


The Degree to Which You're Fucked

by turingtestflunker



Series: The Past is Another Planet [1]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Bigotry & Prejudice, Body Dysphoria, Current Events, Data deserves better, Fish out of Water, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Genocide, Iconians (Star Trek), Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, POV Second Person, Past Abortion, Past Institutionalization, Past Sexual Abuse, Q Continuum, Self-Harm, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Survivor Guilt, Terrorism, Time Travel, Unreliable Narrator, the absence of LGBT people in TNG, the absence of neuroatypical people in TNG, unflattering interpretations of the Federation as depicted in TNG and DS9, universal translator malfunctions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-07-07 03:21:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15899859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/turingtestflunker/pseuds/turingtestflunker
Summary: So you remember that episode where the Enterprise-D picks up some humans from the 1980's and it serves as a contrast between the 20th century and the 24th? Because I do, and I have THOUGHTS. I think that the premise of cryonics was fundamentally counterproductive to the episode's purpose because cryonics inherently biases the pool towards relatively wealthy people who have their lives together. So I wrote a story about the crew dealing with an untrusting, uncooperative, mentally ill, belligerent trans autistic person. Because I found it amusing. Data heavy and tagged self-indulgent for a reason. Enjoy.





	1. The First Duty of a Prisoner pt 1

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place sometime between "The Measure of a Man" and "The Offspring."

You wake up in agony. You remember an ear-splitting bang and being thrown to the ground, you heard music, but you can’t remember...

 

It’s not so much the pain as the profound sense of _wrongness._ The worst full-body  _wrong_ you’ve ever felt.

 

There's a golden man standing over you. Like made of gold, a moving statue. The place you're in looks like some kind of trippy art deco mausoleum. You must be hallucinating.

 

“You,” you croak weakly at the golden vision, “If you're real, I'm gonna need you to help me out.”

 

The vision seems mildly surprised.

 

“Geordi,” you've never heard someone shout so calmly before, “There is a-” he’s still shouting but you can’t understand the words. It doesn’t sound like any language you’ve heard before. Your head is so heavy, why can’t you lift your head?

 

He drops to a crouch beside you. Your coat is wet and sticky. You can't feel your stomach. With a mighty effort, you manage to lift your head a fraction of an inch. You need to see...

 

“Do not move-” he’s got a really weird accent and you can’t parse the tail-end of the statement, but the cadence of his voice is pleasantly regular, soothing…

 

The golden man presses down on your gut to try and slow the bleeding. Your screams are inhuman, tearing out of your lungs. Slowly, you manage to quiet yourself to a low, constant sob.

 

There’s another man in the chamber. He isn’t gold, he’s a nice but ordinary shade of brown. He’s got this shiny cyborg eye thing, though.

 

He speaks urgently with the golden man for a couple of minutes. You catch maybe one word in ten. Something must be going terribly wrong in your brain. Cyborg eye takes a weird mini-vacuum looking thing and points it at a wall. A beam of light shoots out of the thing, splits into a dozen smaller beams and devours a door sized chunk of a nearby stone wall. You decide that this is a pretty cool hallucination, all things considered.

 

There’s a powerful wave of heat. You smell ozone and hear the hiss of the melted rock as it slowly spreads across the floor. Daylight spills in.

 

The golden man rips off a long strip off his own bodysuit to use as a makeshift bandage. You try to help him at first, but in the process you catch a glimpse of the wound. You go limp.

 

“I’m gonna die,” you say, your voice is reedy and hollow.

 

“Not today you aren’t,” Cyborg eye says, confidently.

 

You look up at the golden man, “Don’t let anyone turn in my body. Please.”

 

“I do not understand,” he says.

 

He picks you up as if you weigh nothing at all.

 

Frantic and unsteady, you tap morse code into his shoulder. F 84.0 F 84.0 F 84.0….. You’re 90% certain this guy will know what you mean.

 

“Burn me, bash my brains in and throw me in a ditch, just don’t let them steal my brain, okay?” you’re not just crying from the pain. You liked to think of yourself as tough, tough like a cockroach, but it turns out even cockroaches are afraid to die.

 

The golden man looks at you as if you’re spewing nonsense and you can’t understand what he says in response.

 

“Promise me,” you plead.

 

“I cannot,” he says, and carries you clear of the smoking hole in the wall.

 

What if this isn’t a rescue?

 

The sky is pale purple and there are two dim red suns in the sky. You wonder if you’ve already died, if this is your journey to the afterlife.

 

Cyborg eye taps his chest, and talks to somebody on speaker phone or something. The only word you catch is “Enterprise.”

 

There’s a powerful hum, you feel a faint tingling all over your body. There’s light. Are you dying?

 

The next thing you see is a red haired woman in a blue lab coat. She looks like a doctor. Maybe you’re still alive, after all.

 

“I think I lost consciousness,” you say, and then you do.

 

\--

 

You wake up. The first thing you notice is that nothing hurts. You're on some sort of padded table, flat on your back, which doesn't hurt.

 

Your guts aren't aching and cramping. You flex your feet experimentally. They move, and you're relieved, you were afraid that you might be paralyzed.

 

You can move your feet and your legs and your hips. None of it hurts. The sharp pain in your left foot is gone. Your knees flex without protest. Your hips don't cramp when you wiggle them.

 

You open your eyes and sit up. You’re on a padded table in what looks like a fancy medical clinic. Or maybe a really expensive medi-spa. There are other padded tables, but no other patients.

 

You hear voices coming from a glass-walled office area overlooking the hospital bed-things. You approach cautiously. Three people are talking intently. The doctor you saw before you passed out, a woman with long curly black hair, and…

 

“Excuse me?” you say, feeling awkward, “I’m awake, but I think I may be hallucinating.”

 

The… you force yourself to remember that he’s probably just a normal dude. Just a burly black guy. But you could swear that his skull… it looks warped, folded in on itself. The totally perfectly normal guy is watching your warily. You think you can smell him, not a bad smell, but distinct and unfamiliar.

 

“I didn’t expect you to be up yet-” the doctor looks sympathetic, but you can’t understand half of what she’s saying, “sit down.”

 

The dark haired woman says something in a gentle tone of voice, her accent sounds different than the doctor’s, and even more impenetrable. She guides you gently towards a chair. The light touch on your shoulder itches and burns, she pulls away instantly, as if she felt it too.

 

“I need medical attention,” you say, “There’s something wrong with my brain. I must have hit my head or something.”

 

The doctor says something, you make out the words “24th century,” and “Enterprise.”

 

You flap your hands sharply in frustration, “I can’t understand you! Something’s wrong.”

 

That gets her attention. She waves some kind of sensor at your head. Checking for a fever? You don’t feel like you have one. Why isn’t she doing a neuro workup? Is this lady even a doctor?

 

“This is serious,” you plead, “I was shot, I could be having a stroke or something.”

 

Skull by MC Escher taps a pin on his chest and talks into it like a chest-mounted bluetooth. Dimly, you remember Cyborg Eye doing the same. The consistency bothers you. You’ve hallucinated before, from drugs and from sleep deprivation. This isn’t like that.

 

The doctor, the monster, and the dark haired woman exchange tense words and worried glances. The monster watches you intensely. You avert your gaze and sit perfectly still in the surprisingly comfortable chair. You hope that your brain isn’t dying while these fuckers wait around.

 

Moments later, the golden man appears. He doesn’t look like a statue in this light. There’s too much detail, fingerprints and pores, all in gold without a hint of a natural skin tone hidden beneath.

 

This little glass office was not meant to house five people and it’s an awkward process, the golden man says “pardon me” like five times, while the others look at him condescendingly. You look down, determined not to read anything into it. It isn’t your business.

 

The golden man is tapping experimentally on a tablet. You don’t know where he was carrying it, his bodysuit doesn’t look like it has pockets. Why is everyone wearing skin-tight bodysuits?! Median time from beginning of treatment until symptom improvement is more than two months for most antipsychotics. You don’t know if you can stand two months of this.

 

“Can you understand me?” the golden man asks, his weird accent is gone.

 

“Yeah, but…” you scramble to articulate the dozens of questions this raises.

 

“I'm sorry,” the doctor interrupts, “but we have some urgent questions for you.”

 

Do they, now?

 

“I'm medically unfit to be interrogated” you say, in case they care, “The aphasia has cleared but I'm still hallucinating.”

 

“You were not suffering from aphasia, but rather a malfunction of the universal translator,” the golden man says.

 

“Thank you, Lieutenant Data,” the doctor says dismissively.

 

The nom de guerre is ludicrously on the nose, but that's not unusual. You bristle at the military rank. You notice that, except for the dark haired woman, they all seem to be wearing different versions of the same uniform. There are a few militias on your side who have ranks and uniforms, but none near the last place you remember being.

 

It's a bad sign.

 

“Can you describe your hallucinations?” she asks you.

 

Finally, “Lieutenant Data looks like a hyper realistic white gold statue, that guy” you point at the monster, “looks like his skull is all rippley and shit, and” you point behind the doctor, “there's no ground outside your window, just stars.”

 

The doctor gives you an exasperated look, “As I tried to tell you-”

 

MC Escher interrupts her, “You're not hallucinating, you're on the Starship Enterprise, it is the 24th century, neither Lieutenant Data nor I are human: I am a Klingon and he is an android.”

 

“Worf!” the dark haired woman admonishes.

 

“Apologies, Counselor,” this Worf person rumbles, “But it _was_ faster.”

 

They let you sit with that for a few seconds.

 

“Why,” you ask in a carefully measured tone, “Did you feel the need to tell me what century it is? If I'm just some rando.”

 

“Both your clothes and your poor health suggest that you are from the early to mid 21st century,” the casual way Data says ‘early to mid 21st century’ as if it's just another historical period almost sells you, almost, “As do the projectile fragments found in your abdominal cavity.”

 

Your hands go to your stomach. There's no bandage. There's not even a scar.

 

“How long?” you ask, very quietly, “How long was I out?”

 

“Only a few hours,” the doctor says proudly, “Medicine has come a long way since your time.”

 

This feels wrong. Unreal or hyper-real or something. You might well be having hallucinations or delusions, but you can't just ignore your own perceptions.

 

“I understand that you're confused and frightened,” the counselor says gently, her hand reaches towards you abortively, but she doesn't touch you again, “But we have some important questions.”

 

“No,” you say numbly.

 

“What?” Worf asks, barring his very convincingly alien teeth.

 

“I…” your first impulse is to invoke the Fifth Amendment, some part of your mind is still stuck on the notion that you have rights, “I formally decline to be questioned, for whatever that's worth.”

 

Worf actually growls at you. As intimidation tactics go, it's very effective.

 

“I am afraid that we must insist,” Data says apologetically, “the matter is urgent.”

 

Isn't it fucking always. Whatever else is happening here, you know that the urgency is real. You can taste it on the air. Your head is pounding.

 

“Fuck!” the cramped little office is spinning around you, “Fuck all of you! This mindfuck isn’t working!”

 

Worf glowers at you, the counselor looks distraught. Data is looking intently at his tablet for some reason. The doctor is pointing the sensor box at you again. You don’t care. There's exactly one way out of this.

 

...this.

 

You’re eyeing Worf’s weapon. If you make a godawful noise and violently topple your chair into him, he might be distracted for the split second you need to grab it from his hip. If you have another second, you can put the business end in your mouth and try and figure out how to fire it. More importantly, as soon as he sees you go for it, he has a solid excuse to kill now and play a game of ‘but I feared for my life, your honor’ later.

 

The counselor is looking at you intently. It doesn’t matter, she can’t be that good.

 

Klaxons sound and the lights dim. The boundless stars outside the doctor’s window shudder and then flood violently to one side. You feel like you’re about to vomit.

 

You just want this to be over. Something brushes briefly against your shoulder. You might not get another chance. You…the dizziness is getting worse. You try to push through it and throw yourself at the big guy anyway, but you fall far short and collapse onto the floor. Your disconcerting roar comes out as a faint gasp.

 

“It’s just a sedative, you’ll be fine.” the counselor says kindly, holding some kind of auto injector. Why didn't you feel the needle?

 

You try to fight it, but your body isn’t responding and you can feel your brain fizzling into darkness.

 

You were a fool to think it would be that easy.


	2. The First Duty of a Prisoner pt. 2

You wake up. Slowly, groggily. Tossing and turning on the comfiest bed you've slept on in awhile. There's no blanket. You miss the weight, but you aren't cold. Your stomach gurgles like it always does when you need to eat but are too anxious to be properly hungry.

You’re in a brightly lit, cramped little room. The bed you slept on is a bench that doesn’t look like it has any business being this comfortable. The only other feature is a sink. A moment’s inspection reveals a stowable toilet underneath. You’d call the room a cell if it weren’t open to a wider room.

 

You cautiously try to step outside. It feels like walking into an electric fence. You try it again, because you never were a fast learner, and then again because at that point you’re pissed off. You give up when you feel a persistent aching burn spread across your face and arms. It reminds you of a bad sunburn.

 

So you’re in a cell. The area visible through the barrier adjoins onto other cells, presumably with other barriers. They’re all empty, at least the ones you can see.

 

You pace out the dimensions of your cell and collect your thoughts. You’ve seen and heard some incredible things lately. The stars. The future. Aliens. You force yourself to put it all aside, because for the moment, it doesn’t matter. You’re in a cage. You’ve been captured by an unknown and potentially hostile military/paramilitary group. You have information they want, and they can’t be too thrilled about that shit you pulled in the clinic.

 

It’s a shame that didn’t work. You look around you. There’s nothing loose or sharp, nothing sturdy to hang yourself from. You keep looking, because there’s always _something_. Not this time. Whoever designed this place is an evil genius who’s spent entirely too much time thinking about how people might try to kill themselves. You’ve narrowed your options down to drowning yourself in the sink or bashing your head in against a wall, when someone enters the space between the cells.

 

He’s wearing a different color uniform that the others, and the four pips on his collar are almost certainly a rank marker. He’s bald and gray, but he’s in good shape and his face is relatively youthful. You can’t quite place his age, he’s the kind of man who looks about the same from 30 to 70. The pattern of his footfalls and the tightly controlled way he holds his hands tells you he’s pissed off.

 

Not that you couldn’t have guessed from context.

 

You back yourself against the far wall of your cell to keep as much distance as possible between you. You wish you hadn’t talked to your captors. They saw you flap, and if you’d kept your mouth shut their own assumptions would’ve done the rest.

 

Your interrogator is looking at you intently. You suddenly feel very aware of the fact that you’re clothed only in a thin smock. You swallow and wonder if you have the guts to bite through your own tongue.

 

“Lieutenant Data assures me that you should be able to understand me,” he says, slowly and deliberately.

 

You do, although every third word hits you like an icepick to the side of the head. You know that you need to be dead as soon as possible, but somehow the thought of brain damage still frightens you.

 

“I am Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise, and I have reason to believe that you are concealing information relevant to the safety of this vessel and her crew.” he sounds like he expects you to be ashamed.

 

You aren’t. You’re scared shitless, but not ashamed.

 

You should keep your mouth shut, but some part of you wants this situation not to be as hopeless as it seems, “Who are you people?”

 

“We work for an organization called Starfleet, which seeks to explore the galaxy and advance our understanding of the universe. Starfleet is an arm of the Federation, an organization that works towards greater understanding and cooperation between species” it’s a bullshit propaganda answer, but it’s the kind of bullshit a well-meaning person might come up with.  

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening.” you admit, “I panicked, earlier.”

 

It doesn’t count as giving something away because it’s so fucking obvious.

 

Picard’s posture softens a fraction, “We believe that you may have traveled through a space-time rift, sensors indicate subspace distortions throughout this system. Due to… the nature of our propulsion system, it isn’t safe for us to leave without understanding the nature of these distortions.”

 

The words don’t arrive in your head like speech. It’s more like someone wrapped them around a lemon wedge and jammed it into your brain through your left nostril. You close your eyes and take a deep breath to steady yourself.

 

“Are you alright? I can call Dr. Crusher,” you could almost believe that the captain cares.

 

“I’m fucking fine!” you snarl reflexively, “I’m sorry- I mean, let’s just get this over with. Why is it such a huge problem for you to be parked here?”

 

Picard looks at you like you’re crazy. You are, but you hate him for it anyway.

 

“This region of space is the Neutral Zone between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire.” he says cautiously, as if he’s choosing his words carefully, “If we were to be apprehended by a Romulan patrol, the consequences could be disastrous, not only for the more than 1000 souls on board this ship, but for the quadrant as a whole.”

 

“Quadrant?” you ask.

 

“The Alpha Quadrant.”

 

“Alpha Quadrant of what?”

 

“The galaxy.”

 

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. Yesterday, you thought you were hot shit because you were planning a prison break. Either this guy is a hardened pro at spouting bullshit with a straight face or you’re facing down a civilization that exists on a scale you can scarcely conceive. Put it aside. You have to put it aside or your head will actually explode.

 

“The Romulan Star Empire…” the words feel weird in your mouth, the shapes your lips are making don’t quite match the words in your head, “Doesn’t sound like a friendly group of people. Fascists?”

 

“The question is complex, but essentially, yes.” Picard hedges like an academic and hardens like a soldier, “I wouldn’t recommend trying your luck with them.”

 

“Fuck anyone who calls themselves an Empire. They do actually call themselves that, right? It’s not some ‘axis of evil’ internal propaganda on your end?”

 

It’s a stupid question. He has no reason to answer honestly, and there’s a slim chance he might not even know. You never were good with facial expressions, but you think you see the ghost of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

 

“They really do call themselves that,” he says.

 

“I’d ask about the politics of your Federation, but I’m guessing we don’t have time.”

 

“No,” Picard says firmly, “Our concerns are rather more immediate.”

 

“I can’t give up my friends. Just in case...I can’t…” you ignore the traitorous voice of reason in the back of your head reminding you that, if these people are telling the truth, your friends are all long dead, “but I’ll tell you what I remember about- I don’t know if it’ll help, but I can… can you promise me something?”

 

“That depends.” Picard says evenly.

 

“I, um, I attacked one of your men, I know I’m gonna get smacked around. I want your word that they won’t… that nobody will…” there’s no easy way to say it, “if I’m raped, by anyone on this ship, the deal’s off. Believe me when I say I will watch this ship burn out of spite.”

 

He actually looks more offended by the implication that one of his precious space sailors might be a rapist than your threat to hang all their asses out to dry. If this guy’s peddling bullshit, he’s high on his own supply.

 

“You have my word that no one will mistreat you on the Enterprise. You need not bargain for that.” his face is flat, but there’s sadness in his voice.

 

You look the captain in the eye. Eye contact hurts like of a sonofabitch at the best of times. This isn’t the best of times. You try to push back the pain and listen to your gut. In defiance of all common sense, your gut tells you that Captain Picard believes what he’s saying. You want to believe, too.

 

The communication device on the captain’s chest chirps insistently.

 

“Someone will be here to take your statement shortly.” Picard seems as grateful for an excuse to leave as you are to see him go.

  
He leaves. You collapse against the wall and cradle your head in your hands. Your head hurts like a motherfucker and every second looking at the too-clean walls of your cell reminds you where and _when_ you are. These people maybe, just maybe, might not be monsters. But somehow you still wish Worf had shot you.


	3. The Judgement of History...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags.

True to the captain’s word, you don’t have to wait long. The doors to the brig open to reveal the android who saved your life. It’s strange. It would have been better for everyone if you’d died in that freaky alien mausoleum, but you still can’t help but think kindly of this person who got down into the blood, shit and nasty tomb dust and held your guts in with his bare hands.

 

“You’re the interrogator?” you ask, politely. It’s probably the first time you’ve asked that question without swearing.

 

“No, I am the Chief Operations Officer. Among other things, I oversee all scientific data gathering equipment on board the Enterprise.” Data furrows his brow in thought, “The Captain told me you had agreed to cooperate, would that not make it not an interrogation?.”

 

Is everyone on this ship so goddamned naive?

 

“Counselor Troi will be taking your statement. She is being briefed by the Captain as we speak. I am here in a scientific advisory capacity and to ensure that the Universal Translator is functioning correctly.”

 

“It’s not.” you say immediately, because if he can fix the splitting pain you get every time these people open their mouths, that’d be great, “About half the time, it works normally, but whenever anyone says a big word- I mean like a scientific term or something academic, it feels really weird and hurts like a motherfucker.”

 

“Can you specify what you mean by ‘hurts like a motherfucker,’ please?”

 

You suppress the urge to specify in extensive, extremely unscientific detail. But then you think about it. It feels good to approach the problem analytically.

 

“I mean that I perceive something like the intended meaning without ‘hearing it’ per se, and that that I experience severe pain on the left side of my head, just above my ear. I suspect there’s something going on in my left temporal gyrus, but that’s based on the assumption that 21st century neuroscience knew what it was talking about AND that your universal translator works by external stimulation of the temporal gyrus, like a more controlled version of using transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce auditory hallucinations.”

 

You realize that you’re rambling a little. You stop suddenly, embarrassed.

 

“That was very helpful, thank you.” Data says, as if you just said the most normal thing in the world. Worlds? He fiddles a little with the tablet he’s carrying.

 

“I believe you are approximately correct about the neurological origin of the problem, scans indicate that your temporal gyrus exhibits abnormalities well outside the normal variation, as do…” he looks down at his tablet, “many other parts of your brain. If you do not mind my asking, how are you able to recognize individuals?”

 

You tilt your head at the tablet, “That thing told you I’m face-blind?”

 

“The padd is only a data-readout device, I used the Enterprise’s internal sensor array.” he clarifies helpfully, as if the fact that he can take fine-grain full-brain scans instantly and undetectably isn’t fucking terrifying.

 

“Your fusiform gyrus is almost entirely non-functional. Humans rely on facial recognition to identify other lifeforms.”

 

Fuck that shit, “ _This_ human uses hair and skin color and gross physical characteristics like body size and shape,” an awful thought occurs to you but you put it aside with all the others, “Voices, voices are unique too.”

 

“Fascinating.”

 

Coming from anybody else, it would be the height of condescension. But Data sounds so earnest, so sincere. Not like he’s taking pity on you, but like he’s genuinely happy to know how you work. It makes you want to know how he works too.

 

Does he even a brain, as you understand it? Is it in his head, is it some kind of cultured neuron wetware, or entirely inorganic, does it have a synaptic structure? All the little questions adding up to one big one: how does a creature so profoundly divorced from human neurology remind you so strongly of another autistic human?

 

“Does the universal translator work for you?” you ask.

 

“No, but my positronic brain is equipped with a rapid language decoding algorithm that serves the same function. I am using it right now to speak in your vernacular, to reduce the stress on your temporal lobe while I adjust the universal translator.”

 

There’s a lot to unpack there. But first and foremost…

 

“Your brain is made of antimatter?!”

 

It's an inappropriate and probably highly personal question and you regret it even as several even more invasive follow up questions stack up in your brain-to-mouth buffer. Thankfully, Counselor Troi chooses that moment to arrive, and Data is spared such conversational gems as ‘exactly how much antimatter are we talking about?’ and ‘if someone beat your head in with a shovel, would you explode?’

 

“Hello,” she says gently and you can feel the universal translator working to make her intelligible, “Maybe we could start with you telling me your name?”

 

Your first impulse is to refuse. You survived more than one petty arrest by going through the system as a Jane Doe. But you promised and whatever else this situation might be, it's sure as hell not a petty arrest.

 

“Andy Hegel,” you hesitate, “the records will be under Claudia. Same last name.”

 

“But you prefer to be called Andy?” she asks.

 

“Yes, strongly,” it feels like weakness to admit it.

 

“Andy, while I look human I am actually half-Betazoid. I have empathic abilities. While I can't read your thoughts, I can perceive your general emotional state. In addition to taking your statement, I'm also here to verify your truthfulness. Do you understand?”

 

Well that explains how she caught you in the clinic. You're surprised that she told you. Wouldn't it work better if you didn't know? Maybe she's trying to psych you out. It doesn't matter. You said you would cooperate and you will.

 

“Yes,” you say, flatly.

 

You wonder what it's like, brushing up against someone else's brain. What it's like brushing up against your brain in particular.

 

“Andy,” Counselor Troi's voice takes on a deeply resonant tone, as if you're hearing her voice from more than one place, “Do you remember anything unusual happening in the days before... before you woke up in the Iconian temple?”

 

You remember stress and sleep deprivation. You remember going stir crazy in a succession of precarious safe houses. You remember loading up a stolen van with guns, bolt cutters, and pool chemicals.

 

“No, nothing unusual.”

 

Troi frowns, and you wonder what she's making of the complicated knot of feelings you get when you think about how your life is. Or how it was, rather.

 

“Can you tell me what happened in the hour before you were attacked?” you wonder what she's fishing for.

 

“I, um, yeah. I'll try my best,” you mentally retrace your steps, “I drove the van to my infiltration point. There was supposed to be- our guy on the inside was going to make a hole at the base of the fence, but something went wrong so I had to use my bolt cutters…”

 

“Where was this facility?” Data asks, “As precisely as you can recall.”

 

“Some GEO Group hellhole about fifty miles south by southwest of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tent city for the prisoners and portable barracks for the staff.” you rattle the answer off easily, “I'd give you coordinates, but we were using a GPS blocker and I'm not good at calculating it by hand.”

 

“Why were you trying to break in?” Troi guides you back into your reverie.

 

Why? It was a prison. You don't have time to explain how bad 21st century prisons are, were. No amount of time would be enough.

 

“I had the chemicals. It was my job to make sure the emergency ventilation system was clogged and deploy the package,” you can feel the weight of the backpack, smell the eyebrow singeing fumes.

 

“What was the package?” Troi presses.

 

You realize you don't want to tell her, “Does it matter? It wasn't unusual at all.”

 

“Yes, it could be important,” she knows you're holding back.

 

“Ammonia and bleach. It wasn't even really a bomb, more of a dump and run situation,” you hate yourself for trying to justify yourself to her.

 

“The guards had the prisoners on lockdown outside, they were all going to be in the barracks for someone's retirement party.”

 

“It was your intention to kill the guards with chlorine gas.” Data says, it isn't a question.

 

There are things you could say in your defense. You could tell them that it was immigration detention, people locked in cages for crossing imaginary lines on maps. You could tell them that there were children imprisoned there. You could tell them about the rumors your crew heard from the inside.

 

Instead, you say, “Yes.”

 

“Do you understand that what you did is a war crime?” Troi says, more careful than gentle now.

 

“Is that relevant to the space-time quagmire you and your friends are stuck in?” you ask snidely, because you're pretty sure it isn't.

 

Troi stares at you in what even you can see is shock. At least if you'd been captured in your own time, nobody would have been surprised at what you were doing.

 

“There have been no reported temporal irregularities in the area you describe, however records only go back to the early 22nd century, and of the phenomena which could conceivably produce the observed results, most are highly unstable.”

 

“Maybe it would release energy when it collapsed?” you feel like some jerkwad on TV talking about reversing the polarity.

 

“Perhaps,” Data says, and taps something on his padd.

 

“What happened next?” Troi asks.

 

“I, uh, I was cutting a hole in the fence. There was a patrol. There wasn't supposed to be a patrol. Someone was supposed to…” you trail off.

 

“Please continue,” Data says.

 

You don't want to continue, but you do, “I saw him, saw his face in the dark, he was so pale. He must have been scared shitless. I, I had a little homemade Liberator pistol, tiny and concealable but only one shot and terrible range. I waited, I hesitated, because I needed to be sure I could kill him outright…. I didn't want to have to finish the job with my hands, didn't want to have to touch…”

 

You blink away futile, self indulgent tears and continue, “I pointed the Liberator at his throat and pulled the trigger. I didn't see him pull his gun, it was so dark,” you remember the deafening bang, “we must have fired at about the same time…”

 

You remember being thrown to the ground, of looking up and seeing the stars, and hearing nothing but ringing in your ears.

 

“I think I died,” you whisper, “I remember something… a sound or a sensation that I can't describe. And then I saw Data...”

 

Data taps his padd again, it makes a stern noise and says “Hand terminals may not be used to access this file.”

 

Troi looks away from you, “What is it?”

 

“I have a hypothesis,” Data says, and christ can he move when he wants to, “Excuse me.”

 

You sit down on the bench at the back of the cell. Counselor Troi looks at you for a long time before she goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the bad technobabble.


	4. ... Will Not be Kind to Any of Us.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andy does something stupid. An awkward conversation results.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry about all the typos I've been letting through. I'm trying to clean up the ones that are already there, and I'm spending more time editing.

Counselor Troi’s quiet judgement leaves you restless. You pace the boundaries of your cell until you can do it with your eyes closed. It’s easier that way, not looking at the sterile gray walls and the shimmering forcefield that hold you in. You think, because you can’t stop. You think about escape, even through you promised you’d cooperate. There’s only so long you can stare at a locked door and not try to pick it. You look at the forcefield and wonder how it works. Are there safety settings? Can you short it out? Is it even a physical force? Or does it just hurt too much to cross?

 

You devise a crude experiment. You’ll place both hands level with the field and then allow yourself to tip forward. If it’s just a matter of pain, you’ll still fall forward. And then what? You’ll still be stuck in the brig. Stuck on a spaceship parked in the middle of nowhere. And what if it isn’t just pain? You wish Arriane were here. She had a way with jails. Hospitals, too. And to think people used to tell her that architecture was a useless major.

 

She’d tell you to back off, to bide your time. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that these Starfleet people aren’t lying, at least not about what year it is, but you still hope that they are. That she’s still out there somewhere, waiting for you, if you can fight your way out of here.

 

You sit down next to the field, close your eyes and imagine that you’re somewhere else. You’re sitting on the floor at a friend’s house, before any of this went down. You extend your left arm straight out as hard as you can. Your hand stops as if it hit a brick wall, the forcefield crackles, and a wave of pain travels up your arm. You clench your teeth and fight through it. You use your right hand to brace your left arm, keeping your hand against the field as long as you can.

 

The pain intensifies to unbearable levels and the forcefield doesn’t give a millimeter. You cry out in agony and frustration and let yourself fall backwards, clutching your hand close to your chest.

 

After a moment you force yourself to look at it. It feels like it should be a blackened stump, but it’s still there, bright red and just starting to blister. You wonder if the field is some distant descendant of an active denial system. You were never caught in the beam of one, so you can’t be sure, but the burns look the same.

 

The computer is saying something, but you have to focus to make sense of it and the pain is overwhelming. You barely notice when the door opens. It’s Worf, aka that guy you sort of tried to kill. You can’t bring yourself to care.

 

You look up at him, he’s studying you through the barrier. The odds of him not knowing you tried to fuck with the forcefield are less than zero. You don’t know what happens next. In a normal prison, it would be solitary and maybe a few ‘accidents’ on the way.

 

“Are you injured?” Worf asks.

 

Arriane is dead. Rose is dead. Delphi is dead. Even that shithead Francois Philippe is dead.

 

“I’m fine, I just…” you can’t seem to stop crying, “I didn’t even really want to get out, I just…”

 

“The field was in no danger, you on the other hand...” he trails off ominously.

 

You laugh, “I must seem pretty pathetic to you.”

 

Worf doesn’t deny it, which is answer enough.

 

“All my comrades are dead. Everyone I ever fought beside, everyone I’ve ever met” your voice sounds hollow and distant.

 

“Your hand, show it to me,” Worf orders.

 

You nod, “I’m gonna stand up, first, if that’s okay?”

 

First rule of dealing with cops is, if at all possible, don’t. The second rule of dealing with cops is don’t piss them off. You’ve already broken the first two rules and you know you’re treading on thin ice. You wait for Worf to nod permission, and then you rise carefully, keeping both your hands visible. Once you’re up, you obediently present your hand.

 

“Surface level burns,” he confirms your suspicions.

 

You feel unimaginably distant from yourself. You pretend that Worf isn’t talking about you, that you’re a street medic again and you’re negotiating care for a comrade.

 

“I can rinse it in the sink, but I could use a bandage,” you say.

 

“That won’t be necessary,” Worf says curtly, rummaging efficiently through a box he pulled from… somewhere. Where are they hiding the storage on this ship?

 

He taps buttons on screen you can’t see, just outside your cell. A gap appears in the forcefield, big enough for a loaded cafeteria tray. You realize that they haven’t fed you yet, is it something to do with the gut wound?

 

You put your left hand by the gap, “Should I?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Worf runs something that looks like a handheld flashlight over your hand. The pain improves immediately. It occurs to you that this would be a good time to apologize. It’s your best move, if you want to convince these people that you’re not a rabid dog. But you’re a terrible liar, and the truth is, you’re not sorry and you’d do it again.

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t die in Tulsa, and save you folks the trouble,” you say, because it’s true.

 

Worf pauses briefly mid-pass, “Why?”

 

You wonder if he’ll understand. Maybe the 24th century is too orderly for something as irrational as the thirst for martyrdom.

 

“I fought the cops because they were a plague on the land, murderers and rapists hiding behind badges. I broke prisons because they were hellholes where human decency went to die, and no one deserved to be stuck in them. Much less fucking children…” You swallow the lump in your throat, “I knew, when I started fighting, that they’d take me down eventually. I accepted it…”

 

You never expected to use the Liberator on anyone but yourself.

 

“I should have gone down fighting, I should have made those bastards bleed for it.”

 

Worf growls thoughtfully, low in the back of his throat.

 

“Records from that period are scant and unreliable,” he says almost reluctantly, “but Lieutenant Commander Data found reports that describe a rebellion at that facility on December 21st, 2022.”

 

You can feel the universal translator working hard on the date, but that doesn’t matter.

 

“They pulled it off,” you say in wonder.

 

“Several hundred detainees escaped custody,” Worf puts away the healing ray.

 

Something tight and painful in your chest relaxes for the first time since you woke up in the clinic.

 

“Thank you,” you say sincerely.

 

“Do not attempt to tamper with the security field again,” he says gruffly.

 

“Understood,” you say.

 

And then he’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Worf is a good dude.


	5. Two of Swords, Inverted.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A meal, and another unpleasant conversation.

You wake up in a hospital bed. Everything hurts. Your entire head is a mass of screaming, throbbing pain. You can’t breathe through your nose, and every halting breath you take through cracked and bleeding lips provokes a stabbing pain in your chest. There’s blood accumulating in the back of your throat. It makes you gag, but you’re afraid that if you vomit you’ll choke on it. 

 

You open your eyes. You’re in an ER. Your grandfather is there. He’s talking to the cop standing by your bedside. You jiggle your arms feebly and discover that you’re cuffed to the bed.

 

Your grandfather turns and looks at you. You lied about where you were going to be. Again. He must have driven all night to be here. He really shouldn’t have, not with his heart acting up like it has been. He’s burning credibility with his cop friends fast, getting you out of shit. 

 

“Andy,” he says flatly.

 

“Dad, I’m sorry, but I had to” you whisper.

 

“I am not your father.” 

 

How can he say that? Play that bullshit technicality after all you’ve been through together since Nana and your mom died? How fucking dare he?

 

“Dad, Please...”

 

“Andy, do you remember where you are?” 

 

What a strange thing to say. You realize that the voice doesn’t sound anything like your dad. 

 

“Andy.” the voice says, louder and more urgent.

 

You wake up with a start. Data is standing on the other side of the force field, looking concerned. You feel sluggish and disoriented as you sit up. 

 

“Sorry, I was asleep.” you point out, redundantly, “What’s up?”

 

“You have not eaten in 21.49 hours. As the contents of your digestive system were purged during surgery, it is imperative to your recovery that you eat.”

 

“What time is it?” you ask, as if it matters.

 

“0329 hours”

 

“Jesus,” you say, “Do you usually get up in the middle of the night to make sure prisoners are eating?”

 

Data shifts uncomfortably.

 

“I do not need to sleep, and it is imperative that you eat,” he repeats.

 

“Yeah, fine. Show me the food and I’ll eat it,” you gesture at the bare walls of your cell.

 

You generally fasted in jail, if it was only for a couple of days and you knew there was a big meal on the other side. But this isn’t just for a couple of days, and no one is going to take you to the Waffle House after. 

 

“What do you generally eat?” Data asks politely.

 

You chuckle, “Food. Unspoiled food fit for human consumption. Preferably free.”

 

“Free of what?” he asks.

 

“Food that I don’t have to pay money for. Like from a friend, or out of a dumpster.”

 

“That seems highly unsanitary,” Data observes as he taps on the console outside your cell.

 

There’s a buzzing sound from the sink/toilet area. It reminds you of the sound you heard when he and his friend rescued you from the planet with the purple sky. You find that a little disc of food substance has appeared on a small ledge beside the sink. You pick it up.

 

“What is it?” you ask.

 

“A Starfleet combat ration. It contains sufficient nutrients to sustain most humanoids for 24 hours.”

 

“Awesome, thanks.” 

 

You mean it. You know you need to eat but that doesn’t mean your stomach will cooperate. Something small will be easier to tackle, and it will be nice to not have to worry about it for awhile. You lift the food disc to your nose. It smells profoundly bland. You’re ready to take a bite, but then you hesitate.

 

“If this is drugged, I’d prefer to eat it after we’re done talking.” you say, hoping that the implication won’t offend.

 

Data looks at you as if you’ve just said something outlandish, “It is not drugged.”

 

You have no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth, but it doesn’t matter. He’s got you cornered, and if he wants you drugged, you’ll be drugged. You’d rather eat it voluntarily than make him use force. You take a bite out of the ration. It’s even more bland than it smells. It’s perfect.

 

“Happy?” you ask.

 

“I am an android. I do not have emotions, and as such I am never ‘happy.’” 

 

Well, you’re no robotics expert, but that smells like bullshit.

 

“How do you know you don’t have emotions?” you ask.

 

Data pauses to consider, “I do not smile, laugh, or cry as other lifeforms do in response to emotionally charged stimuli. When I attempt to mimic these responses, the results are… unsatisfactory.”

 

“There are humans with flat affect.” you point out, “It’s usually temporary, or conditional, but it can be lifelong. Doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings.”

 

Data looks at you, and you see yourself as he must see you. Alternately unemotional and hysterical. Pathologically cautious and compulsively violent. How profoundly disordered you must seem.

 

“I have read historical records describing such individuals. While interesting, they were of limited applicability to my situation.”

 

“Historical reports?” you ask, feeling a wave of deadening numbness come over you. 

 

“The vast majority of illnesses and defects which cause those symptoms have been cured.”

 

“Cured.” you repeat, numbly.

 

“Primarily through genetic engineering, although neurosurgical procedures are sometimes necessary.” Data continues blithely, as if he hasn’t just delivered the worst news of your entire life. 

 

“So no more autistic people,” you say.

 

Is it selfish of you to immediately think of your own community? When so many others might have been quietly exterminated the same way?

 

“Some may still suffer from the condition on isolated colonies that do not make use of modern medical technology.” Data says, as if that’s supposed to be a comfort.

 

You can’t stop yourself from crying. 

 

“Are you not pleased?” Data asks, “That a disease which has clearly caused you much distress no longer affects others?”

 

No autistic people means that there’s never been someone to sit Data down and teach him how to survive being different. No autistic people means that, if you ever walk free again, you will be absolutely alone.

 

You shake your head. The words refuse to come.

 

“I… I…” you take another bite of combat ration to justify your silence, “My neurology was never the problem. It was the way people treated me, like I wasn’t as good as them, like I needed to justify my existence. That was the problem.”

 

“I am... familiar with this problem,” Data says.

 

Your heart breaks and you smile through the tears, “I bet you are.”

 

“I don’t think you came down here at this ungodly hour just to make sure that a violent criminal is eating his wheaties,” you eat while you’re talking, Data doesn’t seem to mind. 

 

“I have additional questions.” he says.

 

“Urgent questions?” you ask wryly. 

 

“Questions that do not directly pertain to my duty as a Starfleet officer,” he says, he seems almost ashamed. 

 

The part of you that wants to give the poor guy a hug and punch every single person that hurt him wars with the part that doesn’t want to tell Starfleet any more than they need to know to save their ship.

 

You shrug, “You can ask. Can’t guarantee I’ll answer.”

 

“In the Iconian temple, you asked me to dispose of your body. You seemed distressed by the prospect of your corpse falling into enemy hands. Why?”

 

“I heard that, there were rumors…” it seems kind of superstitious, looking back on it, “That people with abnormal brains were being dissected and studied by the government. Dead prisoners being returned to their families with their brains missing, that sort of thing.”

 

“Ah.”

 

“Was there anything to it?” you ask, suddenly curious.

 

“Scientists associated with the Eugenics movement conducted research at that time on the connection between genetic variations and neurological disease.” he says, “The subject population was drawn from patients in mental institutions in the New England region of the United States, the primary modes of data collection were DNA analysis and passive brain scans.”

 

“Eugenics movement? Jesus Christ.” you put the combat ration down, “I spent 63 days in a Boston psych ward. Do you think…?”

 

“Extensive brain scans would have been taken.” he says, which isn’t a ‘no’.

 

“They had me so drugged up I couldn’t say my own name,” your voice shakes with anger, “I don’t remember a lot of what happened. But I remember being moved around a lot. Way more than normal.”

 

“Which hospital?” he asks, and that’s also not a ‘no’.

 

“Beth Israel, I was there in March and April of 2016.” 

 

“Given your condition, and the treatment you describe, it is highly likely that you were a subject.”

 

“Fuck them!” you swear vehemently, “Fuck them straight to hell.”

 

You already had more than enough to be pissed at them for. Enough rage for a lifetime. Adding this on top of it… the cup overflows, the litany of their sins extends too far for you to be properly angry about it all.

 

You finish the combat ration despondently, “You’re just full of good news, aren’t you?”

 

“I did not mean to offend,” Data says apologetically. 

 

“Nah, man. It’s not your fault the whole world sucks. Sucked, maybe? I’m not too clear on that point.”

 

“I will consult with Lieutenant Worf on the possibility of allowing you access to some introductory historical texts.” Data says after a moment.

 

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” 

 

“I have another question, but I suspect it will upset you.”

 

“If you manage to upset me any more than you already have, I’ll be impressed.” you say, darkly amused. 

 

“Aside from your ideological motivations, what led you to become, as you say ‘a violent criminal.’” he says ‘criminal’ like he expects you to be ashamed of it.

 

“Aside from my ideological motivations. You make it sound so dry and intellectual. Like I solved a big ass math problem and the answer was ‘go set some cop’s houses on fire.’” you shake your head, “It wasn’t like that. Empathy… empathy is cruel sometimes. When you know other people are suffering, it hurts, makes you feel sick inside. I got involved because I wanted to make that pain stop.”

 

“There are other means of combating injustice.”

 

You laugh mirthlessly, “You think I don’t know? I wasn’t always a terrorist, you know? I used to be a good citizen. I voted, I volunteered, I went to polite, properly permitted protests with police protection." 

 

“What changed?”

 

“I assume you don’t need a history lesson about 21st century American politics.”

 

“I do not.”

 

“Thank god. If there’s one good thing about this time travel bullshit, it’s never having to talk about Cheeto Hitler and his merry band of enablers ever again.” 

 

“At some point, I realized that the system wasn’t broken. That it was working exactly as intended, and that what it was intended to do was stomp people like me into the dirt. People who were different in other ways, too. I realized that a good number of the people around me wanted me dead, and that most of the rest would stand by and watch them kill me if it came to it. I felt cornered, doomed. I decided that if I wasn’t safe anyway, I might as well fight.”

 

You look at Data intently, pleadingly even. You desperately want him to understand. You realize to your horror that you care what he thinks of you. It’s pathetic. Imprinting on a kind face. Stockholm syndrome. Weakness. Arriane would tell you to fight through it. But she isn't here.

 

“Someone taught me an old saying,” your voice feels tight and strained, “‘Destroy what’s destroying you.’ So, that’s what I did, right up until… until I couldn’t anymore.”

 

Data’s face and body language are perfectly neutral, but you can’t help but project judgement there. 

 

“Why do you even care?” you ask bitterly.

 

“You remind me of someone,” Data says, “Someone I wish to better understand.”

 

“Who?”

 

He hesitates before answering, “My brother.”

 

You have no idea who his brother is. But you’re guessing that being compared to him isn’t a compliment.


	6. The Last Minute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The situation with the Romulans comes to a head. Andy is unhelpful.

Data keeps his word about the books. The food dispenser spits out a little mini-tablet maybe an hour after he leaves. You welcome the distraction from your idle speculation about the degree to which you’re fucked. Data’s definition of ‘some introductory historical texts’ appears to be ‘enough books to crush a goddamned elephant, not counting the cited primary source materials WHICH ARE INCLUDED’. 

 

You feel like a little boy on Christmas Day. Who wouldn’t want to read a history textbook from the future? You smile almost gleefully when you see that Data has included helpful, laconic notes for each title. Things like: ‘Well regarded near-contemporary narrative account of the collapse of the United States military command structure.’

 

You know you should try to approach it systematically. You look for the most general overview in the pack, and try to read all the way through it before looking at anything else. You fail miserably. All the clickable links seduce you down a referential rabbit hole. At the bottom of it, you find a body of dry, almost clinical reports. The padd notes that they’re translated from a language called Golish.

 

You find yourself mired in the years just after you died, diving into deeper and deeper detail on the civil war you thought was inevitable but never really believed would come. The second American Civil War is so much worse than the first. No fronts, dozens of factions, street to street fighting and tactics that make  _ you  _ sick. A Hobbesian nightmare war of all against all. 

 

The report notes that the death tolls are extrapolated from the contents of mass graves.

 

When you tear yourself away from that, there’s the trudging road to nuclear armageddon to consider. The central governments of the world’s nuclear powers might have been increasingly impotent inside their own borders, but they still had nukes. You read the overwrought statements about national honor and ‘unimaginably grave consequences’ and all you can see is a global suicide pact.

 

Somewhere in all that mess, those asshole Eugenicist scientists made some genetically engineered ubermenschen. You’d think a group of people who devoted their lives to cleansing the planet of those they thought of as lesser would be self-aware enough not to create beings who would do the same to them. But no. The main text of the book you’re ostensibly reading seems to think these Augment fuckers were really important, but you don’t see it. Standing next to every conceivable form of social collapse happening at the same time, they just look like some gene-doped death cult, as pathetically human as the rest of it.

 

For a ‘data readout device’ the padd turns out to be an annoying little shit. It’ll shut itself down periodically and tell you to eat or drink or rest. Despite your best efforts, you aren’t able to find a way around it. It even catches you pretending to sleep. It’s more autonomy than you’ve seen from other Starfleet tech so far, but you’re too busy reading about the downfall of your species to think too much about it.

 

The 2040s and 2050s are basically just twenty years of information about how much it sucks to survive a nuclear war, with the odd warlord, or witch hunt against the surviving Augments thrown in for color. You start to wonder how humanity ever got its shit back together. 

 

Then you hit April 5th 2063. First Contact. And it all makes sense. Histories are written to flatter the winners, and there was no flattery for any human faction in those primary sources. You don’t know what to think of the Vulcans. They invaded your planet. Their records indicate that they had the purest of intentions. But what else would they say? Things seemed to have turned out okay in the end. Everything Data gave you says that they actually did help the survivors rebuild Earth. That they didn’t use that help as a pretext to conquer or colonize. If it’s true, if they actually were that selflessly compassionate, it’s the most inhuman thing about them. 

 

Even so, you can’t imagine that humanity went quietly. A drowning man will fight his rescuer, and you can just picture some dumb shits taking up arms for their right to die of radioactive super-cholera. You’re not surprised when you see that the Vulcan’s first embassy on Earth was bombed, a double-tap suicide attack with stolen water reclamation chemicals. You’re just starting on an account of the investigation into the bomber’s identity when the lights go out. Klaxons sound. There are flashing red lights. You can hear Captain Picard’s voice over the intercom. It’s hard to make sense of him through the absolute sensory onslaught, but you think you hear him say “battle stations.”

 

You screw your eyes shut and press your hands over your ears. You don’t know how long you sit like that, trying to block out the assault, before you feel a hand on your shoulder. It’s Data, and you’re confused. Why would he be here, of all places, in an emergency?

 

You try to articulate that, but when you open your mouth all that comes out is, “Loud!”

 

“Come with me,” he says, and you can barely make him out through the noise.

 

You follow him with your hands over your ears, keeping your eyes open just enough to keep from running into things. He leads you through a corridor. A few people pass you, moving urgently. 

 

“Where are we going?” you ask, probably too loud, shouting to hear yourself over the din. 

 

“The bridge.” Data shouts back.

 

“What?” 

 

What are you supposed to do there? How are you supposed to help in this situation? Are they going to sacrifice your soul to power the astronomicon or something?

 

“The bridge.” Data repeats, unhelpfully.

 

He herds you into an elevator. 

 

“What the fuck is going on?” you demand.

 

“We are within sensor range of a Romulan patrol group. The spacetime anomalies in this system are concealing us, but the Romulans are en route, presumably to investigate the anomalies. It is a matter of time before we are detected”

 

“And you can’t run?”

 

“My calculations suggest that if we were to attempt to travel at faster than light speeds, the interference from the spatial anomalies would wildly distort the warp field, tearing the Enterprise apart in the process.”

 

“So basically you’re-”

 

The elevator doors open. The bridge of the Enterprise is all sleek minimalism and high ceilings. It looks like it should belong to an especially fancy yacht, not a military or science ship. The… it has to be a screen, surely no one would be stupid enough to put a window that size in a fucking spaceship… the screen is tracking an ominous looking green vessel. 

 

There’s a tense conversation going on. Captain Picard is there, as is Lieutenant Worf. For some reason, so are Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi. Your brain never did particularly well decoding multiple speakers, and the universal translator is definitely making things worse. You can’t parse more than one word in ten and your head feels like an overripe melon splitting open in the sun.

 

You realize that everyone is looking at you. You have to fight not to freeze. It’s funny. On paper you should be a badass. You’ve stolen shit from the cops in broad daylight, survived barrages of tear gas and concussion grenades, you’ve fucking killed people. But you’re still terrified of strangers and crowds. It seems unfair, somehow. After all the things you’ve done, you shouldn’t still have to feel like a giant wimp all the time.

 

“Miss Hegel,” Captain Picard stands to look at you, his voice is steady but brittle, “I trust Lieutenant Commander Data has informed you of our situation.” 

 

What does it say about your thought process that the first thing you notice is that he misgendered you? His words ping pong around in your head. You can feel the gaze of a dozen odd people hot and itchy on your skin.

 

“I- I don’t know what you want me to do,” you stammer out.

 

“If there is anything that you’ve chosen not to disclose, anything at all that might be relevant, now would be the time to reconsider,” he’s holding it together like a champ, but you can tell that the calm, collected, surprisingly decent Captain is just as terrified as you are.

 

“I’ve given you everything I have. I know it might be hard to believe, but I don’t actually want you people to die,” your hands are fluttering at your sides despite your efforts to keep them still.

 

“You do understand that if the Enterprise is destroyed, you will die as well?” Picards asks, with the familiar air of someone being very patient with a crazy person.

 

“Who fucking cares what happens to me?” you snap, and the look on his face unsettles you even though you can’t decode it.

 

“I do, even if you don’t.” he says, and it would be an obvious platitude, but he says it with such certainty.

 

His world is burning down around him. People in his care are in mortal danger. 1000 people could die today. You’ve recently spent a lot of time staring at casualty figures for a world-wide nuclear war. World, singular. You don’t even know where to start thinking about the kind of carnage two galactic scale civilizations could inflict on each other. History looms behind Jean-Luc Picard like an albatross. Time is short, and he’s wasting precious seconds insisting that the individual life of a petty bomber has value too.

 

“Francois Philippe Picard” you blurt out, “I knew a guy named Francois Philippe Picard. We worked together to take down a border checkpoint in Maine. Quebecois separatist. Not as smart as he thought he was. Enjoyed killing people too much. Might be a relative of yours, I don’t know. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it mattered. It’s been 300 years and I honestly didn’t think it mattered.”

 

Captain Picard’s shoulders slump, and maybe both of you were hoping that you were going to spit out the answer to this intractable problem at the last minute. But you didn’t.

 

“Sir, the Romulan vessels have engaged their cloaking devices.” Worf says.

 

You don’t know what a cloaking device is, or how it works, or what it means when its deployed on a battlefield. But there’s fear in Worf’s voice, and that’s more than enough to terrify you. Captain Picard turns away from you, towards his albatross. History will remember the destruction of the Enterprise as the beginning of an incalculably bloody war, and it will remember that he was responsible. 

 

“Lieutenant Worf, ready a volley of photon torpedos. I want to be ready for them the second they drop their cloak.”

 

“Aye-” Worf begins, but does not finish. Because that’s when everyone and everything except you and Picard just stops. Frozen in place like an impossibly disciplined flash mob. The bridge is so perfectly silent that you can hear that he and you are the only ones breathing. 

 

“Time’s up!” says the smuggest voice you’ve ever heard, seeming to come from everywhere at once,  “And I must say Jean-Luc, you were quite the disappointment this time around.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a finnicky mess to write. I hope it didn't read that way. Please let me know if I let any typos through. I'm trying to to a better job of catching them.


	7. The Point of the Exercise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q fucks with Picard's head. Other people are involved, but not especially relevant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains allusions to rape.

A body appears to go with the voice. He wraps his arms around both of your shoulders in a way that shouldn’t be physically possible. Despite that glaring inconsistency, your eyes insistently report that his form is that of a middle aged white human male, dressed in an exact copy of Picard’s uniform. He speaks, but he still isn’t breathing. 

 

“I had hoped to let this one play out on it’s own, given the small matter of that wager we had on the Riker affair.” 

 

“You mean when you gave me your word that if Riker resisted the temptation of the power of the Q, you’d never trouble us again?” there’s a seething, barely contained rage in Picard’s voice. 

 

The grip around your shoulders makes your pulse skyrocket, “Who are you?  _ What _ are you?”

 

The entity turns to look at you, “Impatient, are we? I, my dear bloodthirsty little scavenger, am God. Now amuse yourself for a few minutes, the grown-ups are talking.”

 

He lets go of you, and you’re three long, quick paces away before you can even think.

 

“‘The grown-ups’” Picard quotes derisively, “Almost implies that you see me as an equal, Q.”

 

Q laughs, cold and cruel, “Heavens, no! But compared to that…”

 

He points at you, and you should feel something. Angry, or ashamed. But you don’t. The bridge crew are still standing at their stations. They aren’t breathing. You try to take one dude’s pulse, a human man with a beard, wearing a red uniform. His skin is still body temperature, still gives like skin, but his limbs are immovable. There’s no pulse. 

 

You back as far away from Q as you can, up the ramp until your back is against a bank of computer screens.

 

“Doesn’t he remind you of some wild animal failing a docility test?” Q forces eye contact with you as he says the word ‘failing’.

 

“Andy,” Captain Picard says, in a tone that a normal person might find comforting, “This being is not a God. Q’s powers may be considerable-”

 

“Infinite, actually” Q interjects.

 

“But he is certainly not worthy of worship, and his claims to being the guardian of our species are dubious at best.” Picard finishes determinedly.

 

You don’t like the way Q looks at Picard, you don’t like the easy, proprietorial way he lays hands on him. You don’t like the way that Picard doesn’t seem surprised at what happened to his crew. Outraged, yes. Concerned, yes. But not surprised. 

 

You don’t like the way Q puts his hand on the back of Picard’s neck and says, “Don’t think that, just because you’re one of the domesticated elite, you’re not an animal, too.”

 

You really, really don’t like it. But the bridge is spartan and bare in its minimalism. There’s nothing you can use and you’re not strong enough to kill a man Q’s size with your bare hands.

 

“Why?” Picard asks, there’s a small hitch in his voice, just a trace of fear.

 

Data is in front of you, you resist the urge to cower in his shadow. He can’t help you right now.

 

“I really thought you had this one in the bag, Johnny. I made it so easy for you. I plucked the mad bomber from the moment of his death and planted him in an Iconian ruin. Then I started a little subspace turbulence to get your attention. I knew that once you were in the system, you wouldn’t be able to resist taking a look.”

 

“And the spacetime anomalies?” Picard asks.

 

“Well, I couldn’t have you running home and dumping your problems in Starfleet’s lap, like you usually do, now could I? You could have solved the mystery if you’d really tried, you know. Actually interrogating the admitted murderer would have been a good start.”

 

“We detained her- him,” Picard shakes his head in frustration as he corrects himself, “Questioned him.”

 

“You claim to be the representative of an enlightened and intelligent species, and yet you can’t even grasp something as trivial as one mortal’s gender. Do you really think a hardened terrorist like  _ him _ is afraid of a prison cell and a stern talking to?”

 

You are, though. Desperately, deathly afraid. Afraid of being captured, afraid of dying in prison, afraid of being worn down with small kindnesses and giving up everything you hold dear. But you don’t let that stop you. You can’t. The key to defeating a more powerful enemy is confounding their expectations. Being more fearless than they can imagine, more calculating, more bloodthirsty. Looking like a woman when they’re expecting a man, letting yourself look autistic when they’re expecting a ‘Real Person’. Doing the last thing they expect and then making them bleed in the split second you’ve caught them off guard.

 

“You’re implying that I should have had him tortured, I thought we’d established that that isn’t who we are now.” Picard insists.

 

You’re pretty sure Q isn’t expecting you to grab Data’s comm badge, clench it in your fist so that sharp point sticks out between your knuckles, jump over the console and lunge for his eyes. There’s no reason to believe it’ll work, but at least it will draw his attention away from Picard. Maybe distract him from doing something horrible. You make your move. You are not well-coordinated, you are not graceful, but you do it anyway.

 

Q makes a surprised but not especially alarmed noise when he sees you jump. You realize too late that your trajectory is all wrong, you fall far short of his eyes, but your fist connects with his chest. Connects with and then is absorbed by. The moment itself defies description, but when it’s over your fist and Q’s sternum are occupying the same space. You try to pull yourself free, but you’re stuck. 

 

“ _ This  _ is who you are.” Q says smugly, and you can feel the vibration quiver through your impossibly snared hand.

 

“The actions of one man from the distant past tell us less than nothing about the nature of humanity as a whole, as it exists now” Picard says levelly, “What purpose does any of this serve? What point do you imagine you’re proving here?”

 

Q looks at you, “Why don’t you tell the good captain what you did in Montreal.”

 

You laid low with a friend of Francois Phillippe’s after the Maine attack. She was only nominally his girlfriend. She was sick with rage at all of the cruelty of the world. She was ready to push back. She taught you a little French. You taught her how to make bombs.

 

“Never.” you whisper. 

 

“Do not test me, mortal.” Q says softly.

 

She kissed you in the empty field where she detonated her first fire bomb. She smelled like ozone and gasoline. There was an irrepressible glee in her eyes as she stared into the flames. You were helpless in her hands.

 

“You’re going to have to kill me, meat fucker!” you snarl.

 

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Q says, and then snaps his fingers.

 

You close your eyes, waiting for the final blow, fully expecting to be scattered across a dozen star systems. But you were a fool to think it would be that easy. 

 

“Andy!” a woman cries out, and you recognize the voice instantly but you turn to look anyway.

 

It’s Arriane. She’s old and weathered, but you’d recognize her anywhere. She looks terrified. You try to pull your hand free of Q, but he is immovable. 

 

“What’s happening?!” she asks, her eyes darting around the room, taking in the frozen people. Some of whom are very clearly not human.

 

Picard stares at her blankly, which doesn’t feel right. You’d expect him to be talking her down, explaining the situation. He seems almost surprised. Maybe he spaced out to prepare for whatever Q had planned? But he’s not staring blank, he’s looking very directly at Arriane. There’s stuff happening on his face, but you can’t make sense of it. You wish he’d say something, anything. You wish you didn’t have to do what comes next.

 

You turn to Q with your eyes lowered deferentially. You force your back and shoulders to relax. You need to perform surrender as theatrically as it was demanded.

 

“Let me go,” you say, quiet at first but then louder so Picard can hear too. You suspect that’s the whole point of this exercise, “Let me go to her, please.”

 

“Say ‘please’ again,” the Q entity smiles at you and it’s the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen.

 

“Please, Q.” you say, without hesitation.

 

Just like that, your hand is free. You drop Data’s comm badge as you rush to Arriane. She embraces you, and you can feel the frailty of her arms around you. The once wild mane of her hair is thin and gray. You kiss her cheeks and her forehead. 

 

“What happened to you?” you ask, when you’re finally able to pull away.

 

“What happened to  _ me _ ?” she asks, disbelievingly, “Andy, it’s been 50 years and you haven’t aged a day!”

 

You notice that the left side of her face lags behind when she speaks, the painful way she clenches her left hand. 

 

“I’ve aged like three or four days, actually.” you say, because ‘when did you have the stroke?’ is a painful and pointless question, “Doesn’t sound like much, but they were real doozies.”

 

She smacks your arm with her good hand, the impact is so soft you barely feel it.

 

“Don’t be an asshole!” she admonishes you. 

 

You take both her hands in yours, your thumb gently stroking her wedding band. She married someone. Picard is still looking at her. Looking at her as if he recognizes her. The puzzle clicks together.

 

“You’re one to talk about assholes,” you whisper, “Francois Phillippe, really?”

 

She looks at you, and you can’t read her facial expression, but you can feel the way she pushes you away just a fraction. 

 

“He died in the invasion.” she says flatly.

 

“I’m so sorry.”

 

“He died fighting the aliens. But you don’t know about them....”

 

“It’s okay, it doesn’t matter.” you hold her as tight as you can without hurting her.

 

“Of course it matters!” there’s the fire you fell in love with, “Those knife eared bastards invaded our planet, destroyed our country, our religion. Tried to force us to be robots like them.”

 

You don’t know what to say. The Arriane you remember was an anarchist and an atheist who embraced the foreign and the strange. But there’s half a century of blood and ash standing between her and the Arriane that’s in front of you.

 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you.” you realize that you’ve started to cry. 

 

She kisses the tears from your cheek, “No, no, my love. It was horrible. I’m glad you didn’t have to see it.”

 

“I love you so much.” you say, ugly crying into her wispy hair.

 

She rubs your back comfortingly, “It’s okay. It’s not over yet. I have a plan. I’m going to make them pay. They’ll leave us alone once I teach them that they can bleed, too.”

 

“Bleach and ammonia to take down the embassy staff, followed by propane and door nails for the first responders.” you recite numbly. Before the red alert, you were reading the casualty reports. You hadn’t quite gotten started on the in-depth forensics.

 

Arriane nods vigorously into your shoulder, “It’s going to work, Andy.”

 

“I know, I know, I know…” you can feel yourself falling into a loop. You know there’s nothing you could say that would dissuade her. You know in your gut that if you’d been there with her, all those years, that you’d feel the exact same way.

 

She pushes you back so she can look at you, “I’m glad I got the chance to see you again, before-”

 

And then she’s gone. You stare at the space she occupied a split second earlier. She was right there...

 

You hear Q say, “I  _ did _ warn him. A bientot, mon capitane.”

 

When you turn to look, Q’s gone too. Time resumes. The bridge erupts into a barely controlled panic as everyone notices the discontinuity. You glance at the view screen. The Romulan vessels are gone. You hear Data say something about “Federation space.”

 

You don’t care. You look down at your hands. The hands that were holding Arriane’s just a moment ago. She’s gone.

 

She’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that Andy's opinions and perceptions of Q and Picard are not necessarily those of management.


	8. Accountability

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bunch of reasonably nice people from the future gather in a room to politely inquire WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is more discussion of rape in this chapter.

It takes you a minute or two to stop crying. You don’t sob or cry out, but the tears flow anyway. You read somewhere that the ancient Greeks didn’t consider silent tears to be a loss of composure. You understand the logic, but the thought is only marginally comforting. You doubt 24th century humans share that norm. Embarrassed, and very cognizant of how much you don’t belong, you pick up Data’s combadge and slowly back yourself into a corner, trying to stay out of the way.

 

There’s a lot of concerned talking and double-checking of monitors going on. There’s too many speakers for you to follow, even without the universal translator, so you just let it fade into a dull headache. You clench your hand around Data’s combadge. Tight enough that you worry for a moment that you might break it. Not that it matters, it was inside the physical projection of an eldritch deity. You can’t imagine that he would want it back. You’re not sure if you want to keep your _hand._ The future probably has excellent prosthetics.

 

Arriane Picard has been dead for hundreds of years. You saw Arriane young, healthy and alive just a few weeks ago. A few minutes ago, a frail and elderly Arriane told you about her suicide plan. The human brain wasn’t built to contain contradictions like this.

 

Captain Picard says something, and it’s only when you notice him looking at you that you realize he was talking to you. You’re less afraid of him than you were. After Q, everything else seems trivial.

 

You shake your head apologetically, “I have no idea what you just said”

 

The man whose pulse you tried to take speaks, “Dr. Crusher, Starfleet regulations require that all witnesses to Q’s… appearances be immediately debriefed by senior staff. Is that going to be possible here?”

 

You take in the color of his uniform, count the pips on his collar, and guess he must be the first officer. Less than a week ago you were holed up in a nicer than average squat with ‘burn the state’ spray painted on the living room wall in livid red, planning to kill a bunch of prison guards. Now you’re inferring military command structure and obeying orders. It’s worse than just complying, on some level you actually sort of trust them. A limited, conditional sort of trust, but still. Arriane would call you a traitor if she knew.

 

“Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen language dysfunction this severe in cases of brain injury and degenerative neurological disease. In those cases, I’d say no. But all my scans indicate that she-”

 

“He,” Counselor Troi gently reminds her.

 

The doctor corrects herself smoothly, “That _he_ was born this way. Medical science hasn’t seen his condition in centuries, and frankly I can’t tell you what to expect.”

 

“Is there any way to make him fit for debriefing?” Picard asks.

 

You wish you couldn’t understand this conversation, that it would fade into the background noise like most everything else these people say. They’re talking about you, about your brain, about your ‘defects’ right in front of you and you wish there was something you could add, to make yourself a part of that conversation, but there isn't. There just isn’t. You squeeze your eyes shut to block out the light. You desperately want to curl up in a small, dark place.

 

“I think Starfleet Command would understand if we followed the letter and not the spirit here,” the first officer says, “I assume that, uh, he was more or less a bystander.”

 

Bystander? Bystander?! Dimly, you’re aware that your grip on the combadge has crossed the line from pain to damage. You might be bleeding a little and there will definitely be a bruise. Your legs are trembling and you feel like you need to puke, but you can manage that. You can manage this. You can. You can, because fuck these people and fuck that guy in particular.

 

Counselor Troi winces audibly. You remember that she can feel ambient emotions, and you feel kind of bad for her. If your anger is half as loud to her as it is inside your head…

 

“I appear to be missing my combadge.” Data says.

 

You stare blankly at the empty spot on his chest, but say nothing.

 

“As it happens, your assumption is incorrect, and in my experience, Number One, Starfleet Command is rarely ‘understanding’,” Captain Picard says, “If Mr. Hegel is able, we shall proceed per protocol.”

 

“I can do it.” you say, with more certainty than you feel, “I just want to get this over with.”

 

“Quite.” the Captain says, “Let us reconvene in the conference room.”

 

Picard starts walking, everyone follows, except for the two dudes at the consoles closest to the big screen. A quick glance at their collars shows that they’re probably lower ranking. Or maybe it’s just a good idea to leave someone driving the hulking space behemoth. Hell if you know. You might be staring a little bit. You can’t seem to remember how to make your legs work. You have maybe a second to get your shit together before someone notices. Before you remind them yet again that you’re not normal.

 

Counselor Troi hangs back from the others and falls in beside you. She taps you gently on the shoulder, and the mildly unpleasant jolt of physical contact unfreezes you. You start moving. One step after another in a body that feels numb and alien to you. The conference room is another improbably large and luxurious space. The shared wall with the bridge is dominated by bronze models of spacecraft. You look at them as closely as you can as you’re gently herded into a seat.

 

The other wall…. Your brain refuses to entertain the idea at first, but you’re pretty sure those are actual windows. Outside, the stars are rushing by. It makes you nervous just looking at it. The weight of this civilization’s qualitative, categorical technological superiority to your own sits heavily on you. You are currently traveling faster than light. In a hulking vessel, daughter of a long line of hulking vessels, all of which would require extensive orbital shipyards. All built by the kind of overconfident jackasses who would put picture windows on a goddamned spaceship.

 

The part of you that is detached, viewing the proceedings from high above, marvels at the casual hubris of this room’s existence. The part of you that is rooted in your traitorous, twitching meat body is extremely, uncomfortably aware that five people in military uniforms and one trained mental health worker with actual telepathic powers are all looking at you. You close your eyes.

 

“Is he…?” the first officer asks someone.

 

“His brain is overwhelmed,” Troi says, “He’s trying to self-regulate.”

 

You nod and give yourself a few seconds to breathe. To think. You’re in the future, and you’re in outer space, and the people you’re with are from a culture that you do not understand. So far, you’ve been setting those truths aside to stay functional, forcing everything you see into a 21st century analog. But that model isn’t accurate. The Enterprise is not an aircraft carrier, and Starfleet isn’t the Navy.

 

You imagine what would happen to someone who witnessed a high ranking naval officer about to be assaulted by an enemy agent. Someone who was conveniently a known criminal and also verifiably bonkers. There’s a range of possibilities, none of them good, and none of them currently happening. Regulations or not, Captain Picard had latitude here. He chose to have you testify in front of multiple witnesses, without coaching you first.

That suggests he wants you to tell the truth, but it’s not conclusive. Maybe it’s a more enlightened time, maybe no one would think less of him for it. But what if you’re wrong? What if some things haven’t changed? Captain Picard isn’t the sort of person you usually spend a whole lot of time worrying about. He’s an authority figure. He’s a leader, the commanding officer of a spaceship that could conquer your whole planet in an afternoon.  But with Q, he was just as helpless as you were.

 

You open your eyes but keep them firmly fixed on the table. You put Data’s combadge down in front of you.

 

“This is a nightmare,” you say.

 

“I understand that this has been quite the ordeal for you,” Captain Picard says, “but it is of paramount importance than you assist us here. When Q disrupts time, as he did just now, our sensors have no record of his activities. He generally uses this tactic to isolate individuals. It is extremely rare for there to be additional witnesses.”

 

You are the only third party witness to an attempted crime. You do not have the option of refusing to engage with the authorities. You do not have the option of escape. You do not know how the victim wishes you to proceed.

 

“I…” you hesitate, “I cannot act morally in this situation without understanding the social context in which my statement will be received.”

 

That’s his engraved invitation to consent to disclosure. If he doesn’t, clearly and unmistakably, you’ll have to lie. Mentally, you prepare. Deception is hard for you. It requires exactly the sort of thinking about other people’s thoughts that you find so difficult. You sort the events, still fresh in your mind, into a narrative that does not disclose what is not yours to reveal. Something that these people, these kind, intelligent, horribly naive people will believe.

 

Picard leans forward in his chair. The room feels very quiet, suddenly.

 

“The moral course of action in this situation,” he says, aggressively forcing eye contact, “is to state what you saw, and to account for your actions.”

 

He’s frustrated with you, but that’s not new. And it isn’t clear and unequivocal consent.

 

“Okay,” you say, “Um, time stopped. I heard Q talking to Captain Picard, I understood him better than I should have, I didn’t have any translation side effects, I mean.”

 

“Q always appears to speak the native language of the listener,” Worf says.

 

“You mean you hear Q in Klingon?” the first officer asks.

 

“I believe that is what I said, Commander.”

 

“What does _that_ sound like?”

 

“Gentlemen, please.” Picard says, “Mr. Hegel, continue.”

 

“Uh, he told you a bunch of stuff about how humans suck generally and you suck in particular.”

 

You realize too late how unfortunate your phrasing is in this context. You hope the universal translator garbles it.

 

“Sounds like Q.” Dr. Crusher says wryly.

 

“I freaked out when I saw that no one else was breathing. I asked him who he was” you continue, you can do this, “He told me he was God and that he had put me through all this to show you all how bad you are. He called me names.”

 

Here’s the critical point, the crucial snip, “He talked to the captain some more, but I wasn’t listening. I… I was angry.  I wanted to gouge his eyes out. I looked for anything I could use as a weapon.”

 

You clumsily gesture towards Data’s combadge.

 

Worf’s eyes snap to yours, “You attacked Q?”

 

His tone sounds almost… approving. It could be your imagination.

 

Data peers at it from across the table, “There is a trace amount of what appears to be humanoid blood.”

 

“Mine,” you say, dully, “I didn’t wound him. Obviously, I mean... I punched Cthulhu. It would be weird if I was able to give him a bloody nose”

 

“Cthulhu?” Worf asks.

 

“A character from the works of the human author H.P. Lovecraft.” Data says, “Described as an ancient and invincible deity of evil and unreason.”

 

“Not too far off,” the first officer says.

 

“His physical form engulfed my hand. He taunted Captain Picard some more. I was scared shitless, but I told him to go fuck himself,” you pause, unsure if that will translate well, “Then he summoned the image…” you have to believe that it was just an image, “of my late lover to inflict further psychological distress. It… it worked. Afterwards, he disappeared.”

 

“She’s dead, Mr. Hegel.” Picard’s voice sounds mildly reproachful, and also maybe a little bit sad, “There’s no need to protect her any longer. Let the record reflect that the person Q summoned was the notorious terrorist, my ancestor, Arriane Picard.”

 

“Yes,” you confirm dutifully, almost mechanically, “We were together for about a year. I love her- loved her very much and it was my intention to continue our relationship until one of us died.”

 

A soft murmur rolls through the room. You fail to restrain your smile at Picard calling her a ‘notorious terrorist’. Terrorism is more than just murder and amateur demolition, it’s art. Like all art, it communicates something. Usually something like ‘don’t fuck with us’ or ‘you and your surviving friends get the hell out of here’. It was an art you pursued together. One that you know she mastered, because people still remember her name 300 years later. It’s a shame she picked the wrong targets.

 

“Why didn’t you recognize Francois Philippe? He’s as much your ancestor as she is.” you ask, feeling an idle curiosity.

 

“Many humans of that generation refused to cooperate with Vulcan census takers.” Picard says, settling uneasily into a didactic tone, “As you can imagine,  _she_ was one of them. It’s a practice that has left holes in more than one family tree.”

 

The staff are looking at you more intently than before, more judgmentally perhaps. Part of you wants to explain yourself, tell them that there was no way you could’ve known how her views on Vulcans would turn out. But there’s no talking yourself out of this: you knocked boots with the local equivalent of Guy Fawkes. You taught her how to do it, the embassy bomb is practically a love letter. An artful combination of all the techniques you taught her in that damp field where you fell for each other. Their judgement is justified, or at least... historically accurate.

 

“Is that enough?” you ask, piercing the awkward silence, “I don’t feel well and I’d like to go back to my cell.”

 

Picard nods, “I see no reason why-”

 

“No, sir. Wait.” Troi interrupts him, “He’s concealing something.”

 

Shit.

 

The captain looks at her intently, “You’re certain?”

 

“I wasn’t at first, his emotions are… strange, turbulent, but also methodical. He’s lying”

 

She looks at you, “You feel no guilt for this deception, only fear that the lie might be discovered.”

 

That fear rips through you. The bottom of your stomach falls out. Blood pounds in your ears. If Counselor Troi were human, if these were just subjective observations on her part, you might be able to get through this by flatly denying it. But she isn’t, and the chances of you successfully putting together another false narrative with her in the room are basically zero. You have failed.

 

“I’ve been trying to cover your ass, Captain. And I can’t say you’ve made it easy. If all this-” you gesture at everyone in the conference room, “the witnesses, Counselor Troi’s empathy, was an oblique way of signaling that you wanted full disclosure, I apologize for not getting the message. If it wasn’t…. I’m sorry for not doing a better job at lying.”

 

“Cover his ass?” Worf repeats, confused. Apparently the universal translator didn’t do a great job with that one.

 

Data chimes in, “A human saying, meaning to conceal information that another might find-”

 

“Enough.” Picard says, and he’s not just frustrated he’s angry now, “What the hell are you talking about?”

 

And that’s when you realize.

 

“Oh.” you say, stunned, “You actually don’t know. I assumed we were communicating obliquely about how to handle it, but really you just… didn’t know. Uh, this is gonna sound out there, but bear with me. What’s the current prevalence of rape on Earth?”

 

Data answers immediately, “1.725 assaults per million individuals annually.”

 

“Oh” you say, again, “That’s… That’s _very_ different than when I’m from”

 

You shake your head vigorously to refocus, “That explains the misunderstanding. Um, I still don’t know what the stigma situation is, but I guess I don’t really have a choice, so… I attacked Q because I thought he was going to rape you.”

 

“What?!” the first officer exclaims.

 

“I um, I’m starting to understand that I’m looking at this from a sort of warped perspective, that the casual brutality I saw around me everyday isn’t normal, at least not to you. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I was picking up on signals that have new meanings now. But I lied when I said I wasn’t paying attention to your conversation with Q. My ability to notice and understand other people’s emotions isn’t great, but it’s not absent either. I saw that you were afraid. I saw the way Q took pleasure in that, took pleasure in humiliating you. I saw increasingly personal degradation and escalating unwanted physical contact.”

 

You look down at the table, “I acted more or less the way I would have if something similar happened at a concert or an action meeting. I attempted to conceal what I saw because, in my time, it would have been considered shameful for someone in your position to be a victim of that sort of thing, shameful enough to destroy your career. I sincerely hope that’s not the case here.”

 

The room is silent again. Your lay your head in your hands for a moment. You can feel the adrenaline leaving your body. You are broken and depleted and there’s nothing more you can do. You might possibly be crying, just a little. Not so much that you can’t wipe away the tears and look back up at Captain Picard.

 

“You did this in some misguided attempt to protect _me_?” he asks.

 

He seems astonished at the idea.

 

“You’re a person, and no one deserves to have that happen to them.”

 

“He could have killed you.”

 

You shrug, “I’m already dead. The only reason I’m here is because Q thought you’d find me disturbing. I’m not entirely convinced that I won’t just disappear as soon as this conversation’s over.”

 

“I wouldn’t count on that.” Picard says thoughtfully, “There are areas of our history that we humans prefer to gloss over, Q always makes a point of reminding me of them whenever he appears. I think he might find the idea of forcing us to engage with that darker portion of our history entertaining. Your ongoing presence in this time would certainly facilitate that.”

 

You laugh. Not a mirthless or hysterical laugh. A real, sincere laugh. Everyone at the table looks at you like you’ve just cracked.

 

“Before, before all that bullshit with the inauguration.” you try to explain yourself, “Before I realized that my country was a grand edifice of self-important indecency, before I decided that there was no moral alternative to fighting back. I… I wanted to be a history teacher.”

 

Captain Picard smiles at the irony, “Perhaps now, you will be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's going to be one more chapter after this, wrapping a few things up.


	9. Courage in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andy contemplates his situation. Meanwhile, several well-meaning people are extremely concerned both for and about him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look. It's me, with another chapter of the self-insert fanfiction that WILL NOT DIE. And it's not even the final chapter!

You don’t disappear. At least not right away. Maybe Q will take care of it as soon as you’re out of sight of the main characters in his little psycho-drama. 

 

The staff meeting at the end of the universe ends awkwardly. You think that maybe these things usually dissolve more naturally, that people linger to talk things out. But that’s not possible this time, because there’s this kid from the fucking dark ages just sitting there, staring at them. He’s erratic and an obvious security risk, but mostly just pathetic. He’s seen so much brutality that he can’t  _ stop  _ seeing it wherever he looks. It’s so sad. You look at them looking at you, and you despair. Outside the window, the twisted and distorted fabric of spacetime rushes past.

 

After a brief exchange you don’t bother trying to parse, Counselor Troi and Lieutenant Worf team up to escort you out. Troi because you’re fucking crazy, and apparently that’s her department. Worf because, well, obviously she can’t be left alone with you. You probably could take her in a fight, if you were willing to kill her. You’re not, though, which is a little weird. She might be the first military psychiatrist you’ve met that you don’t want to murder. You decide not to tell her that.

 

You let yourself be led. Your body still feels unreal to you. You’re walking, but you can barely feel your feet. Worf and Troi are talking. Talking animatedly, maybe arguing. The universal translator is chugging along, trying to make you understand, but all it’s doing is ratcheting up your headache. It’s a throbbing, pounding pain like a migraine, but localized to the left side of your head. You press your hand gently against the center of the pain, threading your fingers through your hair. It’s longer than you like it. You haven’t had time for a haircut.

 

The room you’re led to isn’t a cell, and Worf doesn’t look happy about it. He steps into your personal space, towering over you and rumbles some dire warning. You can’t grasp the words, but the meaning is clear regardless.

 

“I’ll behave myself.” you say.

 

The words taste bitter in your mouth, but it’s the truth. You’re too confused and too tired to make trouble. It doesn’t look like there’s much to work with, anyway. There’s no visible seam or weak point in the walls and you don’t understand their power systems well enough to start a fire. The bed has a blanket you might be able to hang yourself with, but there’s no good rigging point. There’s a little dining area. Maybe one of the chairs-

 

stop, Stop, STOP. You don’t want to hurt these people. You don’t want to damage this ship. You’re not even sure you want to die anymore. So why can’t you stop thinking about it?

 

Counselor Troi doesn’t let Worf come inside, but you know he’ll be standing at the door. It’s what you would do, in his place. She speaks to you, softly, gently. You don’t understand a word of it. She notices immediately, you can’t track her facial expression but you can see her hand moving towards her combadge. 

 

“Don’t.” you blurt out reflexively, your own words sound slurred and distorted to you, “It’s normal for me, to have trouble understanding people when I’m tired. This is worse, but I think it’s the same kind of thing.” you look down, “Please, I don’t want to be a science experiment right now.”

 

She puts her hand on your shoulder, and you’re about to ask her not to touch you, but then she’s gently pushing you a few paces backward and you don’t understand why until your legs buckle and your butt hits the bed with an audible thump. You hadn’t even noticed that your legs were still trembling.

 

Troi says something to you. She looks at you. Her voice sounds sad.  She replicates some soup and a dermal regenerator. You let her fix the little puncture wound in your hand. It’s a trivial injury, you wouldn’t bother putting a bandaid on it, but it’s not worth fighting over. When she’s done, you eat the soup. It doesn’t taste like much, but warmth spreads through your limbs as you finish it. You hadn’t noticed you were hungry. 

 

She lowers the lights with a voice command. You lay down. You’re too wired to sleep, but Troi expects you to be tired. If you refused, there’d probably be an argument. Worf is right outside. You pull the thin, shiny blanket up to your chin and close your eyes. You slow your breathing and make a conscious effort to relax. You hope that’s good enough to fool her empathic abilities. Maybe it is. Maybe she doesn’t want to argue either. She leaves you alone.

 

You stay like that for a little while. The darkness and the quiet are welcome after the cacophony of the red alert. It’s restful. But it doesn’t take long for your thoughts to trickle back, little by little, accumulating and eventually overwhelming you.

 

The first thought is shame. Horrible, creeping, all consuming shame. Q stopped short of raping Captain Picard in front of you, and maybe all your instincts are wrong and that was never going to happen. Maybe. But there was still violation. You were brought back from the dead for what looks more and more like the sole purpose of inflicting deep personal anguish on one person. The philosophical and historical content of that anguish is irrelevant. You were used to hurt someone, and despite or perhaps even because of all your protests and struggles, you accomplished that goal admirably.

 

The second thought is fear. This quiet moment, alone in the dark, would be the perfect time for Q to disappear you. That’s not what scares you, though. What scares you is what Picard said, about Q finding the idea of you wandering around this strange, fucked up future amusing. You listened to a song once, that started ‘if we assume that God is real, and against us...’ Is that your reality now? If you keep existing, is Q going to keep fucking with you? Is the form of the question even valid, given that your existence in this time and this place is a continuous violation of deep seated human intuitions about the nature of reality?

 

The third thought is… Arriane. You can’t put words to it. It’s the sound of her laugh, the smell of her hair, the frailty of her hands in old age. The tearing, clawing, pain in your chest that swells when you think about her, but won’t let you stop. You weep, shamefully, muffling your sobs with your arm. 

 

It’s not just her death, it’s the betrayal. You fell in love with a woman who broke the law every day you knew her to help migrants and refugees. Who hung out with weirdos and freaks. Someone kind enough to see the good in everyone, even in that shithead Francois Philippe. Even in you. You taught her what you knew about explosives because you trusted her to use it for justice. And you find that centuries later she’s a universally reviled racist reactionary. You don’t really trust the people of this century, and if it was just their word and the disembodied voice of history, you could deny it, imagine that there was some lie or misunderstanding. But she told you herself: ‘Tried to make us robots like them.’

 

You’re autistic. You know through traumatic association and brute repetition what people mean when they call someone a ‘robot’. You told her about it once, in bed after a roaringly loud benefit show that gave you a migraine so bad your nose bled. You thought she understood.

 

You want to see her again, the Arriane you knew. You want to drink cheap beer sprawled on the floor of her shitty warehouse apartment in Montreal and listen to her drunkenly slur her way through an unintentionally bilingual version of  L'Internationale. You want to smell the scent of clove cigarettes on her hair, wrap your arms around her, and tell her how much you love her. You want to scream at her, to seize her by the shoulders and demand answers.

 

You want to know why. Or maybe how. How did she change so much? Or did she change? Maybe, within the boundaries of her instinctual empathy, Arriane was a good person. Maybe she never found those boundaries with another human being and never had to learn how to be decent outside of them. Maybe you just didn’t notice her blind spots because they were yours, too. But what does that say about you?

 

You know it’s a bad idea before you open your mouth.

 

“Com-computer?”

 

There’s a soft, expectant chime

 

“Can you receive and return data given in 21st century English?”

 

“Affirmative.”

 

“Compile all primary sources about Arriane Picard”

 

You have this image of Arriane. An image you can’t help but think of as ‘the real Arriane’. The woman you knew, that friends of yours knew. A figure in your haphazard little community. Your ally, your friend, and your lover. That part of her is gone from the world, from the universe. It exists only inside you. No one else who knew her like that is still alive to talk about it. 

 

“Compiling. Document 1: Initial incident report, source Compassionate Aid Authority, Office of Security. Documents 2-194: Autopsy reports-”

 

“Skip the autopsies.”

 

There are other people who knew her. Not as a person, but through her actions and the consequences of those actions. That part of her survives. It’s not any less real than the part that you knew.

 

“Acknowledged. Documents 195-721: Chief Investigator Valcor’s Personal Logs, Vulcan Science Academy, Office of Urgent Inquiry.”

 

“Start there, narrate the logs.”

 

“Warning: audio presentation of this data would be of excessive length.”

 

“How long?”

 

“9.174 hours.”

 

“Do it”

 

Chief Investigator Valcor’s Personal Logs aren’t very… personal. He discusses his daily routine in a regular, repetitive fashion that you find deeply soothing. He mostly talks about his work, including a few extremely subtle personal opinions and some conjecture that you gather must not have been appropriate for official documents.

 

You begin to relax. Your sobs slowly subside.  Listening like this doesn’t make the pain go away, but it eases it, makes it softer and more bearable. As Valcor methodically unravels the mystery, working his way backwards in time from the chaos of the day of the bombing, to the diffuse network of inside men and women who helped make it possible, back to the amazingly brilliant and astonishingly bitter woman at the center of it all. 

 

Arriane didn’t make it easy for him. She meticulously destroyed everything she owned in a fire that took out her entire apartment building and left her lengthy manifesto in the ashes before proceeding to vaporize herself at the epicenter of the embassy blast. Listening to Valcor find and correlate the tiny bits of herself that she couldn’t burn almost makes you feel close to her.

 

You spend the night like that, curled up in the dark. Eventually, Counselor Troi comes back. It’s not at an especially flattering point in the logs. She does you the courtesy of ringing the doorbell before she comes in. You stop the computer’s narration. You have no doubt that she has unlimited access to your requests to the computer, and probably some more direct forms of surveillance as well. That doesn’t mean you can’t spare her the awkwardness of walking in on you listening to a dry as dust recitation of your ex-girlfriend’s racist screed of a suicide note. 

 

“Come in.” you say, belatedly. 

 

The doors were in motion before you opened your mouth. You catch a glimpse of Worf, standing guard. Was he there all night, or did he come back? He must have come back. A chief of security doesn’t just guard a door for eight hours. 

 

“Good morning,” Troi says, “Difficult night?”

 

“I didn’t sleep,” you admit.

 

“I can tell,” she says, “You should have called me, or Dr. Crusher. Either of us could have prescribed you a mild sedative.”

 

A cold shiver runs through you, “I do not consent to sedation.”

 

“You have to sleep some time.” Troi smiles as she says this, and you’re not sure why. You don’t like it

 

“I do not consent to sedation.” you repeat firmly.

 

Her smile doesn’t slip a millimeter, “You don’t seem to be having trouble understanding me. Are you feeling a little better?”

 

You shrug, “I guess so.”

 

“I’m glad. Captain Picard wants to see you. I thought you might like a shower and some clothes first.”

 

You look down at the plain blue smock you’ve been wearing for the past few days and resist the urge to smell yourself.

 

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

 

“Why don’t I replicate you some clothes, and then you can use the sonic shower and change.”

 

Clothes. You’re going to need clothes. Period appropriate clothes. You can’t just wander around this spandex future in jeans and a t-shirt. The idea is perfectly logical, but it feels strange. You examine Counselor Troi’s outfit, purple and almost skin-tight, with a deep neckline. If she notices you looking, she doesn’t say anything. You want to ask for men’s clothing. But you’re not sure if that’s a good idea. The 21st century tolerated a little light cross dressing from those perceived as women, you can’t be sure that the 24th century is so lenient. 

 

Troi taps a few buttons and a short stack of one piece jumpsuits and utilitarian underwear materialize. She hands you a set of clothes with the underwear folded discreetly inside the jumpsuit. The shoes look like leather, but are springy to the touch in a way that leather isn’t.

 

“Do you need help with the sonic shower?”

 

Sonic shower? You don’t particularly like the sound of that. You’re surprised that the bright minds behind picture windows on a spaceship didn’t just put water showers in, because fuck common sense.

 

“Is it complicated?”

 

Troi tilts her head thoughtfully, “No, not especially. There’s a button on the wall, and you can adjust the vibrations with voice commands.”

 

“Is there any risk of injury if I do it wrong?”

 

The counselor starts to laugh but immediately stifles it, “No, it’s completely automatic. Go ahead, I promise you it’s actually very simple.”

 

You tighten your grip on the jumpsuit. It’s a nice, neutral charcoal color, but the material is worryingly thin.

 

“Okay.”

 

The sonic shower is… fine. You’re reluctant to take off your smock, even behind closed doors. It’s irrational. These people can do a full scan of your entire body, at will, without you noticing. Next to that, nudity is trivial. Trivial. The shower itself takes a minute, tops. The vibrations set your teeth on edge, but they don’t last long enough to really start bothering you. 

 

There’s a full length mirror. It’s big enough, relative to the cramped space, that you can’t really avoid looking at it. At yourself, your body. Which is fine, there’s nothing strictly wrong with your body. Your breasts…. well, they’re still there. Your genitals… You had hoped to get some of this stuff fixed, when the fighting was over and you found a safe place. You don’t know if that can happen now. You look at the place where you were shot. You were wrong about there not being a scar. There’s no scar  _ tissue,  _ but the places where Doctor Crusher healed you are soft and pink, like baby skin. 

 

You put on the clothes Counselor Troi gave you. It’s all so unbelievably soft and thin. Both the underwear and the jumpsuit seem to be handpicked to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. You appreciate that. The underwear is definitely women’s, at least the bra. You’re not so sure about the jumpsuit. It zips up all the way up to your throat. It clings to the shape of you in a way you don’t like, but you’re not sure if that’s tailoring or just the nature of the fabric.

 

You jostle your shoulders to try to make it fit less tightly around the chest. Captain Picard wants to see you. People are going to see you, like this. You suppose it’s better than running around in a hospital gown. You finger-comb your hair back and away from your face. It’s definitely too long, but there’s no tools and no time to do anything about it.

 

You open the door, trying hard not to look as timid as you feel. You’re expecting the Counselor to give you some glib, insincere compliment to try and make you feel better. Or worse, a heartfelt one. Nothing feels quite as wrong as being complimented on your least favorite features. You brace yourself for it like a punch, holding your breath and tightening up the muscles in your back. But the blow doesn’t come.

 

She doesn’t mention it. Doesn’t even unsubtly inspect you, like you did to her.

 

She just says, “Let’s go.”

 

You’re so grateful you could cry.

 

“Okay,” you say.

 

And then you go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... it's looking like this is going to be part of a larger series. Because, despite literally nobody asking, I just can't resist the sweet sirens' song of writing multiple novellas about such fascinating topics as bitchy Vulcan academics, bad solutions to horrific problems, and The Earth Amalgamated Rapid Transit system and its ongoing fight against obsolescence in an age of increasing civilian transporter use.


	10. Disposition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What to do with a problem like Andy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major TWs for rape, institutionalization, ableism, transphobia and genocide. There is also brief mention of an abortion.

And you’re going. Walking the halls of the Enterprise feels different now. The clothes make a difference. Dressed like this, you don’t look so different from the civilians on board. It’s not just that. You’re more familiar with the layout, you’ve gotten used to the way the doors and the lifts work. You’re still being led, but less blindly than before.

 

Worf being there makes it awkward. The past few days, your brain has been ping ponging wildly between two incompatible working theories. You’re either the prisoner of a hostile organization or you’re… what? An uninvited guest, you suppose. An extremely inconvenient one. Since the staff meeting at the end of the universe, you’ve been operating mostly in inconvenient guest mode. 

 

Worf being here reminds you that the prisoner theory can’t be entirely inaccurate, either. If you were the prisoner of an enemy you understood, you’d know what you needed to do. But the congenial veneer that Starfleet puts over everything confuses you. 

 

Compounding the awkwardness is the fact that the Captain’s office can’t be accessed directly. You have to pass through the Bridge to get to it. It’s a terrible design decision. It makes his comings and goings transparent to the crew and there’s no way he can use it for private meetings. The Bridge pass-through creates at least half a dozen eyewitnesses. It’s an infuriatingly unnecessary problem that could have been solved with a dedicated turbolift or even just a fucking corridor. He must do sensitive business in his quarters, or have unofficial office space somewhere else on the ship.

 

Data is on the Bridge. He’s sitting in the captain’s chair, which is cool. Some part of you is surprised that he’s allowed to. He turns his head to look at you. The motion of his neck is odd, more fluid than a human’s.

 

“Good morning, Mr. Hegel. Captain Picard is waiting for you in his ready room.”

 

“I can go in with you, if you’re nervous.” Counselor Troi says, stopping just short of laying a hand on your shoulder.

 

“Why?” you ask, only realizing how that must sound when the words have already fallen out of your mouth.

 

She doesn’t seem offended. But then again, not seeming offended is a big part of her job. 

 

“I’ll be here when you’re done, if you need to talk.”

 

You don’t have a great feeling about the conversation you’re about to have. Your feet don’t seem to want to move, but that’s surmountable. You pretend that you’ve set a bomb in the turbolift. It’s going to blow in fifteen seconds, the shrapnel is going to tear through the bridge. Depending on the power of the blast there might be structural failure and rapid depressurization. You need to be on the other side of the door in front of you NOW, or you’ll die.

 

You imagine it as vividly as you can. Your brain is broken, buggy garbage, but it’s pretty good at turning down the bullshit for five seconds to keep you alive. You walk through the door and into the office. You look at Captain Picard, he looks at you, your eyes meet, and for a split second that’s okay. You’re calm. You’re ready.

 

But then, of course, your imaginary bomb doesn’t go off. You’re left with the reality of the situation. You’re in a confined space, about to have a high stakes social interaction with an authority figure. Fan-fucking-tastic. 

 

“Mr. Hegel.” Picard’s voice is hard, “Take a seat.”

 

You sit down. He hands you a padd.

 

“This is for you. It’s configured to provide a text version of the output of the universal translator. It’s a stop-gap solution, I admit. Mr. Data is still investigating ways to alleviate your issues with the universal translator.”

 

When you were a little kid, a friend of yours had a communication device called a Tango. You would borrow it all the time, it was so much easier than trying to wrap your clumsy young mouth around the shapes of speech. Then your friend started saying a few words out loud, and they took away his Tango. They said it was a crutch and he didn’t need it anymore. Years passed, but he was never as eloquent in speech as he was on the Tango. No one cared, because he was speaking, and speech was better than typing.

 

You take the padd, “Thanks.”

 

“You can also use it to access information about your legal situation.” the Captain adds sternly.

 

Oh, so that’s what this is about.

 

You tap open a summary of the charges and go over the list as quickly as you can.

 

“Where did you get this?”

 

“We began with the file that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation compiled on your activities.”

 

“Oh come on!” you gesture dismissively with the padd, “The FBI? Really? I wouldn’t trust them with a weather report. They were literally founded to harass communists and anarchists with bullshit charges.”

 

Picard raises an eyebrow. You wonder if he knows about your grandfather. Probably. If criminal records and person of interest dossiers survived, there’s a good chance personnel files did as well. It doesn’t matter.

 

“Do you deny any of the charges?” he winces visibly as he says that part, and you can’t figure out why.

 

The list is too long for you to answer right away. Your eyes catch on a few items. 

 

“There’s no way the FBI could have known some of this stuff.”

 

“Some of your associates were eventually captured by the U.S. government. They offered confessions in exchange for more lenient treatment.”

 

An iron fist seizes your heart.

 

“So, my friends were tortured, good to know.”

 

Part of you expects him to balk at that. Expects him to defend the good name of the FBI. To tell you with a straight face that of course U.S. law enforcement would  _ never  _ coerce a confession, that your comrades must have given you up of their own free will. He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. It’s not the 21st century anymore, and the United States has been defunct far longer than Jean-Luc Picard has been alive. He has the benefit of 300 years of hindsight, and no reason to defend the indefensible. 

 

There’s an awkward silence as you continue to speed-read the charges.

 

“I don’t know anything about your legal system, but…” a sick flush of shame comes over you, “Back where I’m from the statute of limitations on prostitution was like 3 years. It’s been a bit longer than that”

 

“Yes, well…” Picard clears his throat, “When your case comes before a judge, he or she will likely dismiss the minor charges, the thefts, the vandalism, and… so on.”

 

Great, so you won’t have to answer for all the Monster Energy drinks you stole. Are all Federation judges hes or shes? That seems odd, given that aliens are involved. It might be translation artifact, but you’d have to tab away from your legal information to check. 

 

“As you said, there are significant and foundational differences between Federation law and the laws of the United States in the early 21st century,” the awkward, stilted way he says ‘United States’ hits you square in the gut every time, “And like any individual accused of a crime or crimes, you will be assigned a lawyer, who will explain those differences to you. But now, as then, there is no statute of limitations on murder. To say nothing of the crimes incurred by your choice of method.”

 

Oh, so the Monster Energy drinks are forgiven, but they’re gonna try and nail you to the wall over the pool chemicals and the gunpowder? Really? 

 

“There  _ was _ a war on,” you point out, as mildly as you can manage.

 

You tab over to the UT helper. You’re satisfied that their list of charges is more or less accurate. You wonder how much spurious bullshit they had to prune from the original FBI file. You hope the whole process gave everyone involved big ass headaches. Like the one you have now. 

 

“I understand that that is how you rationalized your actions at the time, but even the historical accounts most favorable to your position don’t place the beginning of the Second American Civil War until at least 2024.”

 

So, you were a few years early to the party. That’s the difference between a soldier and a mass murderer? If you’d had a hundred comrades, instead of four, if you’d had fancy uniforms and a formal command structure, would that make what you did any less ugly? Or any more necessary? It’s unfair. Five subjective days ago, you would have had no expectation of fairness. But now? You don’t know what to think anymore.

 

“If I had waited…” your voice is shaking and you fucking hate it, you tap impatiently at the padd, trying to beat a text to speech function out of it, “They had already built the first camps in 2017. The started writing trans people out of legal existence in 2018…”

 

You close your eyes and steady yourself for a moment.

 

There’s things that they know, that you haven’t told them. From the historical record, and from all the scans they took. It would be detectable to a 21st century doctor who know what to look for. You have to assume they know that part too. That he knows.

 

“It’s a matter of historical record. What happened in Boston. At Beth Israel. What they used me to help do. They declared war on  _ me _ , in 2016 at the very latest. If I had waited until ‘good’, ‘normal’, people were inconvenienced enough to fight back, I would have died waiting.”

 

Captain Picard leans towards you slightly, over his desk, “The judge will likely take the circumstances into account. The matter of the pregnancy alone is-”

 

You interrupt him, “No.”

 

“Pardon me?”

 

You haven’t managed to get the infernal machine in your hands to make the word sounds for you. Even though that would make this so much easier. You did manage to get it to show you a text retranslation of your own speech. So that’s something. You can know what he’s hearing you say.

 

“I was a trans autistic person. The fact that I was raped was a demographic inevitability.”

 

You look down at the padd. It says, ‘I was a cognitively deficient sexual deviant, my rape was inevitable.’

 

Your rage is incandescent. You could throw the damned thing across the room. But you won’t. You will sit still, you will be quiet and you will gather the information you need, and you will get through this. It’s not the Universal Translator’s fault that whatever language Jean-Luc Picard is speaking has no need for the words ‘trans’ or ‘autistic’. It’s not his fault either. You will get through this. You have to. Someone has to. Someone has to survive to say those words again.

 

“The fact that it happened at the site of Eugenicist studies and experiments, and that I happened to fall pregnant, are a sickening coincidence and the fact that I was able to get rid of it-”

 

“Is not a matter you need to discuss here.” Picard reminds you gently.

 

You put your head in your hands for a moment, “Yeah, you’re right. So this was, what? A courtesy, so I’m not blindsided when you hand me over to the authorities at the next port?”

 

“Not exactly,” the fatigue is palpable in his voice, and something else, too. You’re not sure what, maybe disappointment?

 

“Because of the sensitive nature of the events involved, Starfleet Intelligence has exercised their prerogative to request additional time to review your case before presenting it to a civilian judge.” he pauses, “In the meantime, they have agreed that you can safely be remanded to the custody of the Daystrom Institute.”

 

Well, fuck it all. It turns out history does rhyme. 

 

“Is that the ‘nice word for prison’ kind of institute, or the ‘we do science here’ kind of institute?” you ask bitterly.

 

“The latter,” Picard answers curtly, “Q has summoned or produced… simulacra before. But only for a short time, and never a fully sentient being like yourself. As distasteful as I’m sure you find it, you may provide crucial clues to the nature of Q’s powers.”

 

“Do I have the option to refuse?”

 

“Of course you do.” He has the gall to sound offended by the question, “If you refuse, you’ll await trial at an appropriate correctional facility.”

 

Prison. You’re going to prison. Of course you’re going to prison. You killed a bunch of people and you’re not sorry.

 

“However…”

 

Isn’t there always a ‘however’?

 

“Most judges would consider willing cooperation on this matter to be a major point in your favor.”

 

There it is. The harsh reality behind the pretty curtain.

 

“I would have consented anyway, you know.” you say quietly, “If it’s to help protect people from  _ him _ ”

 

“I appreciate that.” Picard says awkwardly, “In the meantime-”

 

That’s where you give in to your headache and stop listening. You can look at the UT logs later. You look down at your hands and say nothing. You are perfectly still.

 

Eventually, Counselor Troi comes to get you. You go where you’re led. Worf isn’t with her. You don’t question why.

 

On the way back to your room, Counselor Troi touches you lightly on the arm and says, “You seem troubled.”

 

You don’t know what she’s talking about. You’re numb. Numb and exhausted. Not troubled.

 

“Given the circumstances,” she presses gently, “I don’t think anyone could less of you for needing a little help getting to sleep.”

 

“No.” you say, more forcefully than you intended, “I… I think I can sleep on my own.”

 

It’s the truth. There’s a deep weariness in your bones.

 

Troi doesn’t push you any further, which is good, because you’re skating dangerously close to the edge of your limits. You spent your last spoon not screaming at Captain Picard for things that were done before he was born. There just aren’t any more. There’s something to be said for mental health workers who actually know how you feel.

 

She takes you the rest of the way to your quarters in silence before leaving you with a gentle, “Rest well.”

 

You walk into your room and try not the think about the fact that you can’t walk out. You stumble into bed and close your eyes. There are more tears in you than you thought possible. Eventually, you fall asleep. You dream, in vivid, lurid detail, of the smell of gasoline, the dancing of flames, and a harsh, inorganic sound that you are morally certain is the sound of Q laughing at you.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! I thought I'd never get this done. There's probably going to be another big gap before I start on the sequel, but I'm definitely returning to this character. Thank you to everyone who read this nonsense, and a special thanks to everyone who left comments. The comments really kept me going when I doubted the value of this work.


End file.
